Customer stories
Warren + Mahoney has freed up time and resources with the help of Orchestra’s employee share scheme and dividend features
We recently caught up with Aaron Beveridge, the CFO at Warren + Mahoney, to discover how Orchestra has helped streamline their employee share scheme dividend payouts and automated previously time-consuming and manual shareholder tasks.
About
International architecture and design firm Warren + Mahoney was founded in Christchurch, New Zealand, by Miles Warren in 1955. Nearly 65 years later our team has grown to 400 employees at six Pacific locations. Our team aren’t just architects and designers; we like to be involved in projects that will impact and help change society.
Notable designs include Wellington International Airport and Westpac Stadium in Wellington, with current projects including the Bronte Life Saving Surf Club, Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre and more. Warren + Mahoney has won numerous international awards for its unique designs, which effortlessly intersect culture, sustainability and technology. Awards include being named one of the world’s ten most innovative architectural practices by Fast Company in 2023.
To date, Warren + Mahoney has focused primarily on projects in New Zealand and Australia. However, we want to expand our services into North America in the next 24 to 36 months.
Transferring to Orchestra’s platform has freed up my team’s time… Before Orchestra, we’d spend over a day each quarter [on employee dividend payments]…
Aaron Beveridge, Warren + Mahoney CFO
The Challenge
Private ownership is a big part of Warren + Mahoney’s culture, and we love the people who own a stake in it to be on the front line. No one else can buy those shares apart from those working for the company, so it's a privilege to be part of our employee share scheme.
A big part of my role as CFO has been explaining to our share scheme participants what being part of the scheme involves and how returns work. Then there’s the emotional connection and ownership piece of my work, explaining that when they become an employee shareholder, they own a part of Warren + Mahoney and that we work together to make the company even more profitable.
We pay quarterly dividends as part of our employee share scheme. Before discovering Orchestra, this was a very manual and time-consuming process with a lot of paperwork. We have about 40 or 50 shareholders, and individual statements were created for each shareholder, which took up a lot of our time each quarter. We’d also receive a lot of manual requests from our employee shareholders for dividend statements or shareholding documents when they were applying for a financial loan or during tax time.
Orchestra popped up on my radar, and I was curious because it was a very niche product and was precisely what we needed. Orchestra was focused on employee share schemes and dividend statements and had a self-service portal for employees. This was particularly attractive to me as it would let our shareholders take ownership of their shareholding and easily access everything they needed online in one secure place.
The Orchestra team gave us a platform demo, and I loved it. I loved that it was a New Zealand-based business and that the Orchestra team listened to what we needed. The team clearly knew their product well, and we weren’t just given the sales script. The price was very competitive, and we also loved the slick look and feel of the platform. Working with creative people, the look and feel of something is very important, and Orchestra is clean, professional and very intuitive to use - which the team loves.
Now, with Orchestra, [it’s] much quicker, and the communication portion of a dividend payout is much easier to manage.
Aaron Beveridge, Warren + Mahoney CFO
The Solution
Transferring to Orchestra’s platform has freed up my team’s time, especially for employee dividend payments, which we make every 12 weeks. Before Orchestra, my financial controller would spend over a day each quarter preparing an individual dividend statement for each of our 40-plus shareholders. Now, with Orchestra, we can prepare dividend statements much quicker, and the communication portion of a dividend payout is much easier to manage. We now don’t have to worry about emailing confidential information to the wrong person at the company, as everything is managed and sent professionally within Orchestra’s platform.
Our employee share scheme participants can now self-serve via Orchestra rather than contacting me with their questions and requests. In their Orchestra dashboard, they can pull historic dividend statements if they’re applying for a financial loan or filing their tax returns rather than manually requesting them from my team. They can also access all the financial documents about their shareholding that were previously lost in an email chain.
We also love that Orchestra is our single source of financial truth. We no longer have to worry about having 10 years of financial reports spread across various spreadsheets; we now have all the information stored in one place - Orchestra.
Another functionality that my team loves is how Orchestra is fully integrated with the New Zealand Companies Office. So, any filing updates we make in Orchestra are automatically updated on the Company's Office website. What was once a manual process of cutting and pasting information into Word is now automatically taken care of automatically. Orchestra has superseded our expectations.
