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How to onboard your share plan data like a pro

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Do you know how much data goes into an employee share plan and the level of detail that’s involved in setting everything up just so?

No matter where in the world your employees are based, you need to ensure that you’re using the correct information in the right format and using it in the correct ways for everything from administering the plan to following the legal and tax rules and regulations in each region to reporting and for compliance. 

Share plans are a multi-faceted, multi-layered structure. Once they’re launched, they take on a life of their own. The purpose of a share plan is to grow your company and to align your employees with the overall strategic goals and targets of the business. Employee share plans help attract and retain staff. 

As your company grows, your share plan is only going to get more and more complicated especially if your company footprint extends beyond one jurisdiction. You’re taking different rules and regulations, languages and currencies – these all bring challenges to the person in charge of making sure the plan is compliant and working. 

Your plan design may need more and more revisions and amendments while you try to comply with all jurisdictions and regulations, your data is multiplying – exponentially.

Of course, it’s not so much a problem with how much data you have, as it is a problem with what to do with it and how to store it safely. That’s where Global Shares helps and our team, across the board, will make things easy. It all kicks off with our world-class onboarding team. From gathering data to managing it; from designing a plan to launching it; we do it all and have experience in working with some of the world’s biggest companies. 

 

Accounts and accountancy

A big part of share plans is… well, the shares. You distribute them to your employees, and they either hold them and wait for them to vest, or they simply hold them until they want to transact.

But what do they hold them in?

They need an account – they need to open an account and have access to that account, and you need to provide this and document it as well. You also need to make sure that they don’t take any actions before they have the account set up.

Our Implementation team rolls out an enhanced Account Opening task that participants complete within their portal, the first time they sign in. Every language you need is catered for, and all the data is recorded and collected within our secure system. Later, when tax time comes, our dedicated Tax Team will use that data to provide you with accurate annual reports.

With Global Shares, your participants get transparent access to their holdings at any time they want. 

 

Start or switch – securely

If you’ve never launched a share plan, when you’re gathering data from your participants, you need to make sure you do it in accordance with the strict rules – and stricter punishments – of GDPR. And if you’re with an existing provider and you need to migrate your data, you need to be even more careful not to lose any data while protecting it too.

At Global Shares, one of our highly qualified teams coordinates the upload of your company’s plan data onto our platform from start to finish. From support agents to training personnel, account managers and employee communications experts, we are with you every step of the way.

Whether you’re starting or switching – we handle the whole thing seamlessly.

 

Constant improvements

As you can see, there’s a lot of work that goes into implementing a successful share plan. But you can also see that it’s a lot of work that we do, not you. Hand us your time-consuming complexity, and we will hand you back a simple, easy-to-understand share plan in no time at all.

That’s because we’re always re-examining and re-imagining our processes, to better manage our costs and improve efficiencies. We’re always evaluating our clients’ experience with online surveys, and using the feedback to better serve others. Our Implementations teams have dedicated training sessions (in addition to routine training sessions) with our Product team, to learn more about our products, and to make suggestions for the product roadmap. And we pass all of those improvements on to you, the client.

 

The best way forward

Time is money – and we don’t waste either. On average, our onboarding process is completed in eight weeks or less. And we’re always on hand to answer any of your questions.

 

Including right now!

Click the button below, and one of our share plan experts will be in contact to set up a free demo of what our team can do for you.

Please Note: This publication contains general information only and Global Shares is not, through this article, issuing any advice, be it legal, financial, tax-related, business-related, professional or other. The Global Shares Academy is not a substitute for professional advice and should not be used as such. Global Shares does not assume any liability for reliance on the information provided herein.

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