Board portal for privately held companies
A privately held company with investors has a different problem set from one owned by the people running it. The owner base has to be kept informed, the share register has to be right, share issues have to be executed — and everything you do gets examined the day someone wants to buy in or buy the whole company.
Updated
What sets the privately held company apart
- The owner base is larger than the board. Investors who don't sit on the board still have to be called to general meetings and kept informed.
- The share register moves. Issues, option programmes and transfers keep ownership in flux — and no authority holds a copy to check against.
- The shareholders' agreement governs a lot. Pre-emption, rights of first refusal, drag along and tag along affect every transfer.
- Everything is examined in a transaction. The series of minutes, the decisions and the ownership history become due diligence material.
Ownership records belong at the company
In many private companies the share register sits with the accounting firm, the shareholders' agreement with the lawyer and the articles of association in an old email thread. That works until you need all three at once — which is exactly what a share issue or a sale requires.
| Document | What it governs | Common weak point |
|---|---|---|
| Share register | Voting rights, notice and dividends | Updated late, history overwritten |
| Articles of association | Pre-emption clauses, consent, share capital limits | Nobody reads it until an issue stalls on the limits |
| Shareholders' agreement | Voting, board representation, exit | Conflicts with the articles, or doesn't bind new owners |
| Issue resolutions and subscription lists | That the capital actually came in correctly | Terms differ between the resolution and the list |
General meetings become real meetings
With outside owners you can no longer hold the meeting in practice by having everyone agree in a room. Notice periods have to be met, the voting list has to be drawn up and proxies checked.
What Strictboard does and doesn't do today
Meetings, minutes, decisions, tasks, forum and the document archive are live. The digital share register, the share issue flow and the contract generator are in development and not yet released. If you need the ownership register in the system today, that part is missing.
Vanliga frågor
Where should the share register be kept?
At the company. The board is responsible for it being maintained, preserved and made available, and it must be kept for at least ten years after the company is dissolved. Keeping it at the accounting firm doesn't move that responsibility.
Can investors have their own access?
Give them role-based access to what they should see — meeting documents and reporting — without opening the whole board archive.
What should we do ahead of due diligence?
Go through the series of minutes and look for gaps, check that every decision has its supporting material, and reconstruct the share register history before someone else does it for you. That work is far cheaper in advance.
See how it looks with your ownership structure
Tell us how many owners you have and where things currently sit, and we'll walk through what would move into the system today and what would have to wait.
Book a walkthrough