Diligent Entities Entity Management for Corporate Governance Training Course

Course overview

Corporate secretaries, governance teams and legal operations professionals are often expected to provide an accurate, board-ready view of a group’s legal entities, officers, ownership, filing obligations and governance records at short notice. When this information is held across spreadsheets, shared drives and local knowledge, routine changes can create missed deadlines, inconsistent records and weak audit trails. This course addresses the operational discipline required to use Diligent Entities as a dependable system of record for corporate governance data.

Participants learn how to structure entity records, configure jurisdictions and entity types, maintain officer and director appointments, document ownership relationships, manage compliance calendars and produce governance reports in Diligent Entities. The programme connects system activity to governance controls: assigning data ownership, validating critical fields, recording change evidence, monitoring filing obligations and escalating exceptions. Participants gain practical skill in using entity profiles, relationship maps, tasks, document repositories, reporting functions and user permissions to support defensible governance administration.

Instruction combines guided system walkthroughs with realistic corporate secretariat scenarios, including a new subsidiary formation, director appointment, annual filing cycle and group-structure review. Participants work through a controlled Diligent Entities training environment, assess incomplete entity data, build a compliance workflow and prepare management reporting. Each participant leaves with a completed entity-management operating pack: a data-quality checklist, role-and-permission matrix, compliance calendar workflow and report specification that can be adapted for their own organisation.

The course is suited to professionals moving from spreadsheet-based entity administration to a controlled platform, as well as existing Diligent Entities users who need a more consistent governance process. It is valuable for teams responsible for maintaining legal-entity records across multiple jurisdictions and providing reliable information to boards, legal leaders, finance, tax and compliance stakeholders.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Configure Diligent Entities entity profiles using consistent legal, jurisdictional and governance data fields
• Create ownership and subsidiary relationships using group-structure mapping and effective-date controls
• Maintain director, officer and authorised-signatory appointments with auditable appointment records
• Build compliance calendars that assign filing tasks, owners, due dates and escalation paths
• Apply data-quality checks to identify incomplete, duplicated or conflicting entity records
• Generate entity, officer, ownership and compliance-status reports for governance stakeholders
• Set role-based access permissions and document-control practices for sensitive corporate records
• Produce an entity-management operating pack containing workflow, control and reporting specifications

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Corporate Secretaries — who must maintain authoritative entity, officer and filing records for boards and regulators
• Assistant Company Secretaries — who administer appointments, statutory filings and corporate records across a group
• Governance Managers — who need controlled workflows and reliable governance reporting
• Legal Operations Managers — who standardise legal-entity data, processes and system ownership
• Paralegals and Entity Management Specialists — who perform day-to-day record maintenance and compliance tracking
• Tax, Finance and Compliance Managers — who rely on accurate legal-entity and ownership information for decisions and filings

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course. Participants should understand the basic purpose of legal entities, directors or officers, registered offices, ownership structures and statutory filing deadlines. Experience working in a corporate secretariat, legal, compliance, tax or finance function is helpful, but prior use of Diligent Entities is not required. Participants should be comfortable using a web-based business application, entering structured data and working with spreadsheets. No coding, database administration or advanced corporate-law qualification is required. Complete beginners should expect a practical introduction to both entity-management concepts and the core Diligent Entities workflow.

Training methodology

The course is delivered through instructor-led demonstrations in Diligent Entities, followed by structured exercises using realistic entity-management records. Participants configure entity profiles, enter appointment data, map relationships, assign compliance tasks and run reports in a guided training environment. Short case studies examine common failures such as undocumented officer changes, duplicate entities and overdue filings. Group workshops compare governance-control choices across jurisdictions. On the final day, participants convert their work into an application plan and entity-management operating pack for their own team.

Course outline

Day 1: Diligent Entities foundations and governance data design

• Diligent Entities navigation, dashboards and record architecture
• Legal-entity lifecycle from incorporation to dissolution
• Entity profile fields for legal, tax, jurisdictional and governance data
• Entity types, jurisdictions and naming conventions
• System-of-record principles for corporate governance information
• Data owners, stewards and approval responsibilities
• Document repository structure and entity record evidence

Workshop: Participants assess a sample group’s spreadsheet records and configure a standardised entity-profile template with mandatory fields and data owners.

Day 2: Entity relationships, ownership and people records

• Parent-subsidiary relationship modelling in Diligent Entities
• Ownership percentages, share classes and effective-date management
• Group structure charts and relationship-map interpretation
• Director, officer and authorised-signatory record configuration
• Appointment, resignation and renewal event recording
• Jurisdiction-specific role labels and authority limits
• Change evidence, source documents and audit-trail practices

Workshop: Participants build a multi-entity group structure and process a director appointment and ownership change with supporting evidence.

Day 3: Compliance calendars and controlled workflows

• Compliance obligation registers by entity and jurisdiction
• Annual returns, registered-office and officer-filing workflows
• Task creation, recurring obligations and due-date logic
• Assignment rules, reminders and escalation paths
• Workflow statuses, completion evidence and exception handling
• Coordination with external registered agents and advisers
• Control testing for overdue and unassigned obligations

Workshop: Participants build a quarterly compliance calendar for a regional entity portfolio and produce an overdue-obligation escalation workflow.

Day 4: Data quality, access control and governance reporting

• Data-quality dimensions for entity-management records
• Duplicate detection and record-reconciliation methods
• Required-field validation and periodic data-attestation cycles
• Role-based access permissions and segregation of duties
• Confidential document access and retention controls
• Entity, officer, ownership and compliance reporting options
• Report specifications for board, legal, tax and audit audiences

Workshop: Participants conduct a data-quality review, define access roles and create a governance report specification for a general counsel briefing.

Day 5: Operating model and workplace implementation

• Entity-management operating model design
• RACI matrix for record maintenance, review and approval
• Onboarding legacy data from spreadsheets and shared drives
• Data migration validation and cutover controls
• Key performance indicators for compliance and data completeness
• Issue logging, remediation and continuous-improvement cycles
• Ninety-day Diligent Entities adoption roadmap

Workshop: Participants complete and present an entity-management operating pack containing a RACI matrix, data-quality checklist, compliance workflow and 90-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

Diligent Entities, Diligent Boards, ISO 37301 Compliance Management Systems, Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) LEI Standard

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions