Secretariat®

Bridgeway understands the challenges that you face every day in ensuring corporate compliance. Secretariat from Bridgeway was designed specifically by corporate secretaries to manage the legal structure and life of a corporate entity.

Automating key processes saves time, and ensures that your information is accurate and up-to-date. Secretariat uses a comprehensive database system and a series of wizards, reports, reminders, document creation and document storage tools to streamline the process of keeping a corporate entity current and compliant.

Secretariat helps you manage the details. You will be able to keep track of all subsidiary information and respond to changes quickly. You can easily notify responsible parties, and anticipate and meet deadlines. Bridgeway solutions are based on best practices –methodologies proven successful within high performance corporate legal departments. Bridgeway aligns technology with people and processes to make compliance easier with Secretariat.

World-wide reach

Secretariat’s unique security feature makes it easy to distribute the workload to local offices while maintaining the entire database at corporate headquarters. You can maximize resources and rely on high quality and current entity information. And 24/7 availability means that your users always have access to Secretariat.

An essential part of your corporate governance program

• Ensure that your corporate records are trustworthy and complete
• Save time and effort
• Know that your entities are compliant
• Locate information easily with full search capability

Features you really use

• Manage all corporate minute book information for every corporate entity type.
• Use wizards for repetitive tasks, generating reports, forms and documents and updating key information.
• Access an editable library of standard resolutions.
• Assemble documents by merging fields, text and graphics into ready-to-print papers for signatures, and store the templates for easy access and re-use.
• Manage all relevant documents with a built-in document repository or links to your document management system.
• Display ownership by parent or subsidiary and create simple-to-complex hierarchical graphs. Use colors and shapes to display key information according to your preferences.
• Offer various departments instant, secure access to current entity information from a self-service Web page.
• Customize standard reports to greatly increase your reporting options.
• Preserve and adhere to security in reports.
• Link with your team’s calendar to view and prioritize important dates.
• Easily locate obscure information with a sophisticated search and ad hoc reporting tool.

See and understand every subsidiary relationship in your organization.

Automatically generate corporate charts from your Secretariat database. Define shapes according to entity type, and colors by region or country. And if your corporate structure changes, it’s easy to update an existing chart.

Enterprise-wide extensions

New compliance guidelines and reporting requirements are expanding the boundaries of the corporate secretary’s office to encompass all aspects of the organization. As your responsibilities grow, Bridgeway has the power to extend your entity management tool to deliver an enterprise-wide corporate compliance tracking solution.

• Automatically notify your compliance officer of predefined (Sarbanes Oxley) events such as the addition of a board member who has positions within other subsidiaries, or when a company’s ownership shifts by a predefined percentage.
• Automate workflow around any specified Secretariat task/project such as dissolution of a company. Automatically notify the tax department and set a list of predefined steps in motion.
• Integrate with your human resources (or other) system for updates to contact information for directors and officers.
• Notify the tax department of an approaching annual return deadline or a change of company name.
• Integrate with your legal department’s patents and trademarks system, and tie patents back to company owners within Secretariat.
• E-mail the Assistant Corporate Secretary when a renewal date of any kind is approaching.
• Set a pre-defined series of calendar events in motion when an entity becomes qualified in a new jurisdiction.
• Synchronize with your legal department’s matter management system to identify where an individual interfaces across the organization.
• When an entity is sold, automatically check your legal department’s matter management system for any outstanding legal matters and immediately notify the Chief Compliance Officer.