Free Business Ownership Spreadsheet

Transcript

How to Use Free Business Ownership Spreadsheet

To use the free Business Ownership Spreadsheet, go to berkmansolutions.com, choose Free Tools.

That will bring you to this page.

Choose Free Business Ownership Spreadsheet.

There are two components to the spreadsheet.

Entities and People

On the left we have Entities and People.

This is a table of unique legal entities and individuals that you’re going to use to create ownership relationships.

Ownership

Over here on the right, we have all of the ownership relationships that you want to track.

These are a set of paired relationships between the individuals and entities on the left.

You see that we have Company A, B, and C.

They have different types.

They’re in different jurisdictions.

Add New Person or Entity

Let’s add an individual that we can then build and enhance our ownership data.

We’ll say John Smith.

You’ll notice that in the Type column, we have predetermined legal entity types.

You can change this and add your own legal entity type for your own jurisdiction or your own situation, but we’ll make John an individual.

You can add a country.

Every country in the world is available here.

Then if the entity is in the United States, which is customary that United States legal entities are at the state level, you can select any US state as the jurisdiction.

Otherwise, leave it blank in the example of this UK entity here.

Add New Ownership

Over on the right, we’re going to create that ownership relationship.

Investment and Investor Entities

We already say that Company B is the investment.

That means that it’s the child or subsidiary of the investor.

Ownership Units

Company A in this example owns Company B. Company C also owns Company B. They each have 500 units.

A unit could be stock or shares or membership interests or partnership units, what have you, and the percentage of the total.

Entity Type and Jurisdiction

The legal entity type and jurisdiction will be pulled in automatically from the table on the left, and they relate to the investment.

Company B is an LLC from the state of California in the US.

Let’s come here, and we’ll make Company A an investment of John Smith.

We can simply select him.

You’ll notice that all of these are automatically populated by the individual entities on the left.

We can add a new one here too if we want, but adding a new entity on the left will show automatically in each of these columns.

We’ll say that John owns 100 units and 100% of that Company A. You’ll see that that data about Company A is pulled in here automatically.

Download Spreadsheet Data to Save

Now, an important note.

You can download and save these spreadsheets.

In order to save the data that you enter here, you must download them.

When you navigate from this page, you will lose this data.

You want to make sure to come to these three dots and choose Download as CSV or Microsoft Excel.

There’s no registration.

There’s no cost, but make sure to download your data before you leave this page.

It will not be saved when you navigate away, and that’s true for both of these spreadsheets.

Automatic Organization Chart for Ownership Spreadsheet

As a bonus, however, I’m going to show you how to create an ownership chart or organization chart automatically out of this ownership data.

We’ll come here and we’re going to download that as a CSV file.

Those three relationships are downloaded.

Free Trial of Lexchart

Now, we’re going to create the chart automatically in Lexchart.

Lexchart is a special tool that is built to create legal entity org charts or any kind of an org chart.

You can create a free 14-day trial that is full-featured and allows you to import the data.

Go ahead and create that free trial and then we’re going to import that data.

Once you log in, you’re going to see a page like this.

Lexchart main charts page

These are all of the charts that this example account has loaded here.

You can create charts from scratch, but what we’re going to do is import that ownership data because we want to see it automatically.

Import Ownership Spreadsheet

We’ll select Import and choose File.

Here is that ownership data we just created a moment ago.

Lexchart wants us to map that data.

We have to explain what the columns mean and how they relate.

The investment, you’ll recall, we said were the children.

From a hierarchical perspective, the investment is underneath the investor, which means the investor is the parent.

Units and percent are linked data.

They relate to the connection between those two things, so we’ll mark them as linked data.

Finally, the legal type and jurisdiction are data about the child or the investment, so we’ll say those are child data.

Once we’ve done that, we can import that data and Lexchart will build the chart for us automatically.

Let’s give it a name.

Format and Design Chart from Ownership Spreadsheet

You’ll see there’s a little bit of overlap.

We will, in this case, just expand the gap a little bit and Lexchart automatically redraws the chart to accommodate that.

We can take full advantage of the design tools inside of Lexchart.

For example, we can switch to these curved connectors to make it really clear who owns what.

We can select any of these and change the design however we need and make it look more like this to emphasize a particular entity if we want.

There are many powerful tools inside of Lexchart.

You can explore the tutorials and documentation there, but I wanted to show you this special bonus that you can create a free trial Lexchart and then automatically generate that ownership chart from that ownership data that’s here.

If you need full legal entity management, you have lots of entities with governance and compliance and document management as well as ownership, you can do a free trial of Lextree, which is a full entity management application that does a lot more than just ownership.

Just create that 14-day free trial of Lextree.

All that data will be saved in the cloud permanently for you, and then you can build that out and do all sorts of things like manage officers and directors and filing requirements for any jurisdiction in the world.

But if what you want is to just track ownership information for your legal entities, these spreadsheets will do the trick for you and we hope you enjoy.

Thank you!