Customer stories
Boffa Miskell streamlines share transfers and dividend distributions on Orchestra
Blair Walker, Boffa Miskell’s Chief Operating Officer, speaks to Orchestra about their recent efficiency gains with Orchestra’s new automated shareholder dividend distribution.
About
Boffa Miskell is an environmental planning and design firm known for its expertise in enhancing the value and sustainability of natural, built, and social environments. With a team of 250 employees spread across nine offices, our firm has gained recognition for its multi-disciplinary approach and award-winning services.
We saw efficiency gains straight away with using Orchestra
Blair Walker - Boffa Miskell COO
The Challenge
As an employee-owned company, Boffa Miskell needed to find efficiencies in managing its annual share transfer and dividend distribution processes. We work through a yearly share transfer process and traditionally managed share ownership using spreadsheets which had become increasingly cumbersome when we nearly doubled the number of shareholders as we broadened our ownership model.
To find a more efficient solution, we adopted Orchestra, an online platform that simplified the share transfer process and managed all holdings in real-time. The role of Orchestra was to digitise our legacy (and trusted) spreadsheet-based process, making it easier and more streamlined.
“We’ve eliminated the need for spreadsheet calculations and merging data into a mail merge to distribute individual shareholder statements. It was all straightforward and accurate!”
Blair Walker - Boffa Miskell COO
The Solution
We saw efficiency gains straight away with using Orchestra. We were up and running quickly, and all share transfers from that point automatically synced because of the direct integration with the New Zealand Companies Office–we only needed to update one system. It also made the annual returns process effortless, requiring just a single click to complete. The success of Orchestra in digitising and streamlining the share transfer process has played an important role in facilitating our broader ownership model at Boffa Miskell.
When we saw that Orchestra were introducing a new dividend feature, we knew we had to try it. Boffa Miskell generally pays a dividend to shareholders twice a year. Before this feature, all individual dividend calculations were done in a spreadsheet. Once completed, the team would use mail merge, involving spreadsheet calculations and individual statement generation for each shareholder. This manual process was time-consuming and prone to unintended mistakes.
After using this new feature in Orchestra, Boffa Miskell saved time using automated calculation capabilities that perfectly matched our spreadsheet calculations (after a few spot-checks). In addition to this efficiency boost, we no longer need to use mail merge, and all shareholders can now access their individual returns independently for transparency and convenience.The shareholders of Boffa Miskell (our employees) have also found the transition to Orchestra easy. They can now see how the share price has changed over time, and it is easy to track their shareholder history and documentation and access anything they need from the Orchestra portal. Moving to Orchestra has been a win/win for our team, who administer the share registry and dividend process, and the growing number of shareholders we have at the company.
