GCD provides a macro-to-micro view of the enterprise and the documents creating it. Click for a larger view...

Simplicity from complexity

Run your business
Visualise cashflows & assets
Build a deal room

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Users

Users of GCD include investment managers, banks, law firms, small businesses, charities and private equity firms.

Cloud Computing at its Most Straightforward

As a cloud computing service, GCD does not need to be set up or run by IT specialists, and is suitable for front office or middle office implementation with minimal training, assisted by GCD telephone support.

A Small Investment for a Permanent Benefit

We believe setting up a GCD schema of any business or commercial situation is one of the quickest and easiest ways of getting a good grasp on what is there, identifying things that need to be done, and finding cost savings by rationalising structures.

Why is GCD Better?

GCD differs from other systems, which are usually some sort of nested folder system for electronic files inefficiently supplemented by ad hoc paper filing systems, by reason of its inherent business logic, the thoroughness of the integration of structure with the setting of user rights, and the logical way in which hard copy and electronic data are dealt with, and the natural way a web based system overcomes legacy system handicaps.

Compliance

GCD is compliant with the requirements of legal and tax authorities as regards record keeping, offering clear audit trails and records of where original documents are kept where (rarely) required, and offers clarity and consistency of record keeping and retrieval allowing focus on key activities.

GCD allows the user to avoid the time wasting, confusion and other difficulties associated with ad hoc and idiosyncratic electronic and paper records of vital documents.

 

Secure

  • GCD provides SSL encryption and DigiPass tokens ensuring security to online banking standards and beyond.
  • Granular security — access is only available to the precise entities and information granted, and is readily revoked.
  • Multiple layers of authentication and security.
  • Full audit trails.
 

    Connect

  • Access your data from anywhere with our mobile-device enhanced site.
  • IPhone, BlackBerry and Android compatible.
 

GCD is fully supported; training and help with building your GCD application is always available.

Individual GCD systems can be tailored and built for specific needs.

 

 

How GCD Can Benefit Me...

Click on a section below for more information.

As an Individual:

CEO, COO or CFO

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.

Venture Capitalist

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.

Equity Analyst

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.

Bookkeeper

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.

Lawyer

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 onlĂ˝ 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.

Accountants and Auditors

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.

Administrator

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.

Tax Advisor

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.

Company Director

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.

As a Business:

Tracing Beneficial Ownership

Know-your-client and anti money laundering principles are increasingly relevant to professionals and financial institutions. Demonstrating that beneficial ownership of clients and counterparts has been traced and recorded is essential. Using GCD, and particularly building appropriate Schemas sourced from documentation provided, is the natural way to achieve and demonstrate compliance with the applicable legislation.

Deal Rooms and Shared Repositories

Using GCD repositories for sharing documents allows secure sharing of information to partners and prospective or established clients or counterparties. Simple allocation of user rights means only the relevant individuals see and store documents, and shared GCD Schemas allow structure to be conveyed for quick comprehension and knowledge transfer between individuals and businesses.

Full audit trails allow accessing of documents to be traced by the owner, and email alerts mean that new documents loaded are immediately brought to the attention of users.

Fund Structures

GCD evolved in the funds industry, where it is an operational necessity to keep track of multiple entities (eg feeder funds, master funds, counterparties, management structures and underlying assets). For this reason it is particularly suitable for deployment by fund service providers and investment managers.

Senior management in funds businesses will derive immediate benefit from using GCD, and typically the time and personnel demands of the audit process and compliance will be enormously reduced.

Property Companies

Keeping track of assets, lending and security and tenant documentation is usually a multiple location and multiparty job. GCD offers a coherent one stop platform for keeping all relevant documentation in a common system which is secure and easily navigable, taking asset and corporate management a quantum step forward.

By mapping assets, banking arrangements, structures and tenant relationships onto GCD, life for managers, owners, bankers and surveyors will be made much simpler throughout the whole acquisition, management and disposal cycle.

Holding Company

Any holding company structure will have its own unique features. GCD permits a diagrammatic representation of ownership, intercompany loans, banking arrangements and all of the other arrangements put into place over time, with the ability to drill to the individual documentary evidence of those relationships.

Once built, management, advisors and auditors alike will find their lives a great deal easier.

Charity

Charity structures, large or small, are natural candidates for GCD. From keeping track of tax documentation, to capturing and recording assets and projects, particularly in far flung places if overseas projects are part of the core mission of the charity, GCD will help both management and staff in immediately tangible ways.

Joint Ventures

By their nature, information in joint ventures has to be shared between stakeholders, and timely delivery of financial and commercial information is of the essence of smooth running of the relationships.

GCD usage eliminates issues of information or system ownership, and implementation creates a background of trust through platform sharing and demonstrated commitment.

Trusts

Trusts present a particular challenge in the flexibility of structure and documentation that typically characterises them.

For the trustee or trust administrator, GCD enables a clear understanding of the unique features of each trust arrangement, and identification of trustees, assets, beneficiaries or purpose. This saves time and increases the ease of servicing trust requirements accurately and according to the requirements of the individual trust structure.

Tax Structuring

Tax structuring of enterprise presents particular challenges of record and accurate implementation.

GCD enables the whole process of tax structuring from design to implementation and maintenance to be executed with confidence from initial advice to exit, allowing advisors and clients to maximise compliance.

Business Process Improvement

GCD can be used as a key efficiency improver, by providing a coherent and well structured platform for relating with counterparts and internal functions.

By way of example, consider the efficiencies involved in allowing people who regularly deliver invoices to put them in the right place on your GCD system. They can easily be induced to go along with the new process, as it can be made a precondition of payment, and then a whole filing task is completely eliminated, and bookkeepers and auditors can easily access the documents.

Insolvency

Insolvency situations are characterised by confusion and difficulty in tracing assets, and finding the documents that create, often competing, obligations.

Building GCD schemas of insolvency situations is the easiest way to quickly grasp and convey the realities of the documentary web comprising the business, and assist professionals in unpicking the picture and achieving recovery for stakeholders.

 

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