The family office register: what one document should tell you
Most family offices have good advisers in four jurisdictions and no single place where the entities, the dates and the obligations sit together. The register is that place, and the test of it is whether anybody can say what is outstanding without making a phone call.
Problems, in order · Part of Outsourced General Counsel
Dinmore Bell builds and holds one register for a family office: every entity and directorship, the filings and dates that follow them, facility covenants, insurance, and the contractual obligations across the operating businesses and investments — with one named person accountable for acting on it rather than reporting on it.
Most family offices have excellent advisers and no single document. Four jurisdictions, three law firms, two accountancy practices, a trust company and a bank, all doing competent work — and nobody able to answer a simple question: what is outstanding, and when.
That question is the test. If it takes a week and four phone calls to answer, the structure is running the office rather than the other way round.
What is actually missing
Not information. Every fact exists somewhere: in a filing, a data room, a deed, an adviser's file. What is missing is one place where the facts sit together and somebody is paid to act on them.
Advisers report. A register is a different instrument — the operational spine of the office — and it only earns its keep if it is complete and if acting on it is explicitly somebody's job.
What the register has to contain
Entities and ownership. Every company, partnership, trust and foundation, with jurisdiction, incorporation date, registered office, registered agent, and who owns what. Include the dormant ones. Dormant entities are exactly where filing defaults and forgotten liabilities accumulate.
Directorships and authority. Who sits on which board, who can sign what, and up to what value. Most offices find the gaps in this at the worst possible moment — a transaction needing a signature from a director who resigned two years ago, or a bank refusing a mandate because its record and the register disagree.
The filing calendar. UK companies must file a confirmation statement at least once every 12 months, with accounts on their own cycle, and every other jurisdiction has its equivalent. One calendar covering every entity, each with an owner and a lead time — not a diary spread across six advisers' systems.
Facilities and covenants. Every loan, mortgage and guarantee: lender, amount, maturity, security, and the financial covenants with their test dates. Covenants are usually the highest-consequence dates in a structure and the least often diarised centrally.
Insurance. Policies, insureds, limits, renewal dates and notification obligations. A family office typically carries property, liability and D&O cover, often alongside art, marine or motor, placed by different brokers at different times.
Contractual obligations. Across the operating businesses and the investments: leases, shareholder and joint venture agreements, management and advisory contracts, supply agreements, employment and household arrangements. For each, the counterparty, the value, and the three dates that decide things — renewal, break, review.
Governance. The family charter, shareholders' agreements, reserved matters, succession and decision rights, and the powers actually granted under each. Not the sentiment — the mechanics.
The ten-second test
A register works if these can be answered without a phone call:
- Which entities have a filing due in the next 60 days, and who is doing them?
- Which break option expires first, and what is it worth?
- If the principal is unavailable for a month, who can sign what?
- Which covenant is closest to being tested, and where is the headroom?
- What is total annual adviser spend, by entity and by discipline?
If the last one is uncomfortable, that is the point of the next section.
How to tell you are paying twice
Duplication is rarely deliberate. It is the natural result of adding advisers over twenty years and never retiring a scope.
The patterns are consistent:
- Two firms both maintaining a version of the corporate records, neither authoritative.
- A trust company and a law firm both reviewing the same distribution.
- Overseas counsel instructed for a local filing the registered agent already includes in an annual fee.
- Annual reviews that produce a document nobody reads and no decision anybody acts on.
- Process work billed by the hour that could be scoped and fixed.
Building the register is what surfaces all of this, because it is the first time anybody has listed every entity against every adviser against every fee.
Reporting is not the same as acting
A register that produces a monthly report and nothing else has moved the problem, not solved it.
The office needs one named person whose job is to act: serve the notice, instruct the filing, chase the adviser who has gone quiet, take the break option, put the covenant question to the lender before the test date rather than after it. That is a different function from producing the report, and it is usually the function that does not exist.
Where to start
You do not need a system to begin. A spreadsheet with every entity on it, built from official sources rather than from memory, will surface more in a fortnight than a year of quarterly meetings.
Three practical steps:
- List every entity from the register of companies in each jurisdiction, not from the office's own list. The discrepancy between the two is the finding.
- For each entity, name the adviser, the annual cost, and the next date.
- Then decide what to keep. A dormant entity that serves no purpose costs money every year and carries filing risk for nothing.
What Dinmore Bell does
We build the register from the underlying documents rather than from what the office believes to be true, which is where the surprises are. Then we hold it: dates diarised with lead times, advisers coordinated against agreed scopes, fees benchmarked, and duplicated work stopped. Matters are handled discreetly, information flow is controlled, and no client is identified in anything we publish.
Where a specialist is needed
Tax computation and filing positions are the work of chartered tax advisers, and investment advice the work of regulated investment advisers. Both stay with the office's own advisers, coordinated against their scopes rather than duplicated. Trustee decisions and regulated trust administration sit with the licensed trust company. Local filings in each jurisdiction are made by the registered agent or local counsel — instructed, diarised and chased through the register.
Dinmore Bell provides an outsourced General Counsel function for founder-led businesses, owning work of this kind end to end rather than advising on it and handing it back.
Common questions
- Is this a piece of software?
- No. Software helps once the content exists, but the work is assembling accurate content and giving somebody responsibility for it. Most offices that bought a system first still cannot answer the ten-second questions.
- Who should own the register — the family or an adviser?
- The office. An adviser who owns the register has an interest in its complexity. Ownership belongs with the office, with a single accountable point of contact who instructs the advisers rather than waiting on them.
- How long does it take to build one?
- For a dozen entities across two or three jurisdictions, typically a matter of weeks — and most of that is waiting on documents from existing advisers rather than doing the work itself.
- We already get a quarterly report from our lawyers. Is that not the same thing?
- A report tells you what happened. A register tells you what is outstanding and who is doing it. The test is whether every item on the report has a named owner and a date attached.
- Does this replace our existing advisers?
- No, it coordinates them. Tax, audit and regulated advice stay exactly where they are. The register makes each scope visible, holds everyone to their dates, and stops the same work being paid for twice.
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