Simplicity from complexity

Senior managers need to know all the elements of the businesses they run, from the top to the bottom.

Moving into new roles, acquisitions and divestitures, changes of tax regime and ownership all makes keeping track of everything harder and more time intensive than it should be.

Building and maintaining a GCD system immediately resolves many issues of understanding or information deficit that are otherwise a daily, and entirely unnecessary frustration.

Appropriate implementation will also dramatically cut down time and energy spent on the audit process, with all the concomitant cost savings.

Having a visual record of the corporate structures that you have invested in, and the positions of others, whether banks, managers or co-investors, is an invaluable reference tool, saving hours delving into historical and evolving documentation.

The added ability to run the documentation element of the investee companies and quickly bring advisors up to speed on situations by sharing GCD schemas means that GCD is an invaluable tool for the ongoing running of developing businesses.

Decomposing accounts into the constituent cashflows that actually create value and reveal the true trading health of a business is always challenging.

The more complex the structure, the more challenging the job of understanding what is really driving cashflow and unstitching reported accounts.

GCD schemas are excellent tools for assisting in developing a real picture of performance, and seeing where cash is generated, and where it goes.

Whatever the size of a business, the task of organising and retaining incoming and outgoing invoices and related correspondence is of enormous importance. Turnover tax, income and corporation tax, tax audits and tax investigations all require a systematic approach to have been taken to this mundane but essential component of business.

Failure to deal with this efficiently results in time loss, advisory costs, and distracted personnel.

Implementing GCD is one of the easiest ways to ensure that this element is, and remains, thoroughly in order at all times.

Inevitably, for any lawyer, a lot of time is spent creating bundles and bibles of documents for particular purposes, and unpacking from documentation the precise relationships between clients, their contractual and financial counterparts, investors and customers.

Lawyers also spend considerable time drawing relationship charts using either pen and paper, which is onlý useful to the drawer, or presentation software like Powerpoint, which is far from ideal for the job, takes an inordinate amount of time, and usually ends up with a poor analysis, which does not adequately relate to the situation in hand.

Using GCD, online bibles can be created very quickly that are shareable, wholly or in part, and with descriptions that make real sense (parties, date, whether draft or final, description etc). This means that such bibles are a great deal more useful that the usual list of often eccentrically or unhelpfully named documents in a list or series of folders that online bibles or CD's of documents are usually presented as.

In addition, because it is possible to go that step further and create full GCD schemas from the documents, the information conveyed can be many times richer and more useful, saving enormous amounts of time in the knowledge transfer and comprehension of situations.

GCD schemas are easy to create as it is designed for the task, unlimited in extent (not limited by the size of a putative piece of paper) and the direct links to the documents creating the relationships save hours of time in comprehension and retrieval of documents.

Preparing accounts and putting together an audit file involves understanding and documenting the arrangements and relationships of clients and their counterparts, owners, bankers and customers.

Where there is more than one entity involved, this entails each member of the audit team, which often changes from year to year, reading into the audit file and the documentation supplied to them to evidence the accounts line items. This is time consuming. Housing the documents on GCD and taking a couple of hours to build a GCD schema will almost immediately pay dividends in knowledge transfer and lessening the burden on each subsequent audit cycle.

When administering clients' affairs, one of the most important tasks is the retention and retrieval of critical documentation, and producing the documents as and when required.

To provide adequate client service, it is desirable for staff to understand of where the piece of the jigsaw that they are responsible for fits.

Storing documentation on GCD and creating GCD schemas from it to picture the client's affairs, together with the ability to accord the client privileges to see documentation without having to engage in communication cycles of telephone calls and emails, allows better client service, savings in time and energy, and an increase in profitability.

As a tax advisor you need to know what a client's structure is, and what it should be so that the cash flows produced by the business only pay the taxes due on an optimised structure.

GCD allows understanding of what is there, traced to relevant documentation if required, and restructuring with a secure sense that advice has been followed by ensuring that documents reflect the advice and embody the required elements of the revised structure.

At Board level, involvement with the company's affairs is partly reliant on filtered information provided in Board packs.

Recovery of past minutes and other documentation is often a matter of great urgency, and the ability to explore key issues in depth away from the Board meeting useful.

By using GCD to store minutes and group documentation, and with GCD schemas to assist in recollecting structural minutiae, visuals of underlying cashflows and balances can be created and validated, and the terms of important documents found quickly.