StreetLights Residential is a large-scale real estate development company made up of 385 legal entities, and counting. Deboraha Myers is responsible for managing all of them.
Each time the company closes a new property, more entities are created. Each time the company needs to open a new bank account, it needs to access critical documents, membership information and employer identification numbers. That means each day, Deboraha gets multiple emails from others in her company asking for all of that and more.
In the past, entity information was accessed through StreetLights Residential’s outside counsel, and each request had to be routed outside of the organization — a process that consumed hours of back and forth in a fast-moving industry where time is money.
“Our network of entities is very complex,” Deboraha explained. “We just needed a place to put all our entities and be able to access who the members are, where the documents are and have easy access to the EINs.”
So Deboraha started investigating how technology could create a better process.
Given the complexity of the StreetLights Residential network of entities, Deboraha needed simplicity in the system that would help her manage it:
- Each entity has its own supporting documentation. She needed a system that would put those documents at her fingertips.
- She also needed a way to access critical information, such as membership, EINs and jurisdictions, as well as all the relevant filing deadlines.
- With 385-plus entities to manage, search functionality was also key, giving her a way to go directly to the information she needs, without scrolling through pages of entity listings.
- And she needed all of that delivered in a single solution that was both affordable and reliable.
The search to satisfy all those requirements led her to EntityKeeper.
“It’s all right there. Everything’s convenient. Everything’s very fast,” Deboraha said. “And the system doesn’t seem to ever go down.”
Deboraha maintains the EntityKeeper system meticulously and fields daily requests from the rest of the organization, while keeping track of important entity deadlines for all of StreetLights Residential. But by far, the best feature is the amount of time it saves her on a daily basis — “a lot of time,” she said. Information that was once housed with an outside counsel or chronicled in volumes of minute books lining the walls of the office is now accessible instantly and from anywhere.
“it’s very convenient. It’s very economical, and it serves our purposes,” she said.
Want to test drive EntityKeeper and find out how technology could transform how you manage multiple legal entities?
