# Subject: Silverfin Development Environment – Directors and Shareholders Not Available in Period Data

**URL:** <https://community.silverfin.com/t/subject-silverfin-development-environment-directors-and-shareholders-not-available-in-period-data/2633>\
**Category:** API\
**Tags:** shareholders, directors\
**Created:** [June 1, 2026, 2:00pm UTC](https://community.silverfin.com/t/subject-silverfin-development-environment-directors-and-shareholders-not-available-in-period-data/2633 "2026-06-01T14:00:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Maarten\_Vandenhende](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Maarten\_Vandenhende](https://community.silverfin.com/u/Maarten_Vandenhende)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2026, 2:00pm UTC](https://community.silverfin.com/t/subject-silverfin-development-environment-directors-and-shareholders-not-available-in-period-data/2633/1 "2026-06-01T14:00:10Z")

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Dear all,

We have recently set up our Silverfin development environment and are currently working on further developing our statutory/judicial documents.

To ensure that our changes do not unintentionally affect existing documents, we have created several test dossiers that we use to verify that no critical changes have been introduced elsewhere.

As part of this process, we also need to add directors, shareholders, and other company stakeholders to these dossiers. Since we do not have a direct connection to our administrative environment in the development setup, we attempted to do this using the _Get People of a Company_ and _Update People of a Company_ APIs.

 ![20260601 - screenshot Shareholders & Directors](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/uploads/getsilverfin/original/2X/3/327ab192d8bb2c19a475ad718aa991823a1b7403.png)

While we are able to create directors and shareholders through the API, we seem unable to use them effectively within our documents because they are not linked to a specific period. As a result, they do not appear to be available in the same way as period-related data.

 ![20260601 - verification people for any given period](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/uploads/getsilverfin/original/2X/8/8d8982513d74b16d60e16db037735daa01745729.png)

For illustration ,the snippet above returns three 0 in this case.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue, or does anyone know of a recommended approach or solution for handling this in a development environment?

Thank you in advance for your help.

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**Author:** ![Delphine\_Demeulenaer](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.silverfin.com/delphine_demeulenaer/32/2374_2.png) [@Delphine\_Demeulenaer](https://community.silverfin.com/u/Delphine_Demeulenaer)\
**Post date:** [June 3, 2026, 9:11am UTC](https://community.silverfin.com/t/subject-silverfin-development-environment-directors-and-shareholders-not-available-in-period-data/2633/2 "2026-06-03T09:11:17Z")

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Hi @Maarten_Vandenhende!

Thanks for the detailed write up! This is a known limitation when working in a development environment with manually uploaded bookkeeping data.

**The root cause:**

`period.people`, `period.directors` and `period.shareholders` in Liquid templates are populated by the administrative sync (the connection to your accounting software). In a dossier without that connection, these collections are empty, even if people are visible in the UI. The _Get/Update People of a Company_ API writes to the company-level people list (what you see in the UI) but not to the period-level collection that the Liquid reads from.

**The recommended approach:**

To use `period.people`, `period.directors`, and `period.shareholders` in your development environment, you need to **push the people data via an admin sync**. Importantly, this does not need to be a real admin connection, it just needs to be an active sync set up in the dossier. Once a sync is active, the yellow banner indicating that more recent data is available will appear in templates, and the period-level people data will be populated correctly. Once the yellow banner appears, trigger the sync, this is what actually pushes the people data into the registry.

Without any sync configured in the dossier, the period-level people collections remain empty regardless of what is added via the API, which is what you are currently experiencing.

Let me know if you run into any further issues!

Kind regards

Delphine