EquityList Product Updates

We’re excited to unveil an improved version of our ‘Valuations’ feature (find it under ‘Cap Table’ on the left-side menu).

It's a comprehensive single-view to track past and current valuations of your company (à la historical ledger, so to speak).

What’s new?

• With the nifty new view, we’ve highlighted three important pieces:
  1. Your company’s current fair market value (FMV),
  2. the number of days left till the current FMV is valid,
  3. a progress chart to visualize the growth in value of your company since it started, along with its post & pre-money valuation.
     
• The dashboard also shows details for each valuation like:
  • Effective Date (the date from which the valuation became effective),
  • Round Type (the funding round it applies to),
  • Valuation Type (how was the valuation determined e.g. through a merchant banker, registered valuer, 409A, in-house, etc.),
  • FMV Per Share (the FMV of a share calculated from its related valuation),
  • Option Pools (the valuation affects the FMV for which options pools; selected previously by you when adding a valuation), and more.
    
• Finally, if your company has also conducted a separate valuation for its stock options then you have the freedom to store that information too under the ‘*Options*’ tab.
  
  Important: If you apply the ‘Options’ FMV to an options pool, then it will overwrite the ‘Shares’ FMV that had previously been set for that same pool.

Company admins now have the option to pause vesting for option holders, such as in cases where team members are on personal sabbaticals or extended leaves.

Pausing a vesting schedule automatically modifies the vesting events to accommodate the pause duration.
E.g. for a 12-month vesting period starting from Jan 1, 2024—if the employee takes a 30-day leave in March—then their vesting period now moves forward from Jan 1, 2025 to Jan 31, 2025.

How does it work?

• On the EquityList platform, under ‘Equity Awards’ > ‘Grants’, select the relevant grant.
• Scroll down to the ‘Vesting Schedule’ section. You’ll see a ‘Pause Vesting’ option on the right.
• On clicking the ‘Pause Vesting’ button, you’ll be notified to select the start and end dates.
• Upon pausing a schedule, the grant page will refresh and you will see a revised vesting schedule with updated dates.

(Under ‘Equity Awards’ > ‘Grants’) When you issue a new grant and specify the 'Grant Terms,' you can now input either the total grant value or the number of options, and the system will automatically calculate the other for you.

(Note: you must first enter a 'Grant Date' for this feature to work)

We've made several enhancements across various features by adding summaries, emphasizing important metrics, and simplifying the layout to make dashboards easier to understand and use.

Buyback enhancements:

• When submitting a buyback request through their dashboard, employees can choose to receive the payment in their salary account or enter different banking information for the transaction - an important workflow for exited employees.
• In the 'Legal' > 'Templates' > ‘New’ section, we now offer customizable surrender letters for different employee groups, such as former and current team members.
  This way, letters for past employees can include their bank details, whereas those for current employees will not. This allows for two distinct templates that can be used in the same buyback.

Create and store RSU grant templates:

• Head over to ‘Legal’ > ‘Templates’ > ‘New’ to create and store RSU grant templates under a separate document category of ‘RSU Grant’. Keep things organized and easily filter between different template categories.

We’ve released a slick new version of our buyback flow.

Find it under Equity Awards > Buyback Programs.You can now:

• select an appropriate settlement method for your buyback program -
  
  Recycle method will allow you to recycle the surrendered units back to the respective options pool for future issuance.
  
  Extinguish method will cancel the surrendered units, effectively shrinking the pool size on your cap table.
  
• easily track the progress of your buyback program with the new user interface which highlights key metrics for requests and budget.
• bulk upload buyback requests and send invitation emails to employees.
• see all surrender requests related to buyback on the same page.
• create, issue, and execute surrender letters to employees who participated in the buyback.

With this revised buyback flow, you can run your entire buyback on EquityList without having to manually distribute surrender letters or make changes to your cap table.

We’ve updated the design of the default EquityList grant letter template so that it looks less like from 2012 and more like from 2024!

Note: When creating a new ESOP scheme, the new grant letter template is selected by default, with the name ”EquityList Standard Template”.

You also have the option to create and store your own custom-designed grant letter templates.

Previously, we were working with an external eSigning vendor to create electronic signatures on documents/agreements generated through the EquityList platform.

But that came with its limitations of customization, performance issues, and user experience…

…so we took it in our own hands and built the eSigning capability in-house!

Now we have even more control over the data (and its security) that is stored or created through our platform.

What does this mean for you?

• All documents eSigned on EquityList will now be affixed with a Signature Certificate.
• No more eSign token expiry, employees can still execute grants older than 90 days.
• A compliant electronic signature for executing your documents.

Rearranged items in ‘Cap Table’ for easier access and logical flow:

• You will now find Share Classes, Share Certificates, and Shareholders items combined under a single page called ‘Shares’.
• Similarly, Convertible Debt and SAFEs are now under a single page called ‘Convertibles’.

Updated how currency amounts are displayed on the EquityList platform:

• When a user selects a currency format, all amounts will follow the related international standard e.g. one million will be displayed as  ₹10,00,000 (India) and $1,000,000 (US)

As our customers keep introducing different types of equity awards for their employees, contractors, and advisors - we decided to shuffle around the interface to make your grant management experience seamless.

Now find your ESOP, SAR, and RSU grants under Equity Awards >> Grants. Seamlessly switch between tabs to manage your different equity pools and their respective grants.

You can now also apply quick filters to your grants to better slice through hundreds of grants across various stages: Draft, Executed, Expired, and more.

In our perennial quest to help employees better understand the value of their equity grants, we have made the Employee Dashboards much more empowering and comprehensive!

• Options summary: a complete summary of the awarded grants and units.
• More metrics: vesting completion rate, realized units and value (from buybacks and secondaries), company ownership, and more.
• Value graph: an interactive graph for better visualization of the growth in employee’s equity over time, accounting for both realized and unrealized value creation across future vesting, exercises, and buyback events.

We have been receiving phenomenal feedback for the new employee dashboards and are excited to have you go and check them out!

With hundreds of grants being issued every month on the EquityList platform, it was about time that we further simplified your e-Signing flow by reducing repetitive actions.

Earlier, company admins had to repeatedly upload their signatures for executing a document on EquityList, you can now:

1. Set specific signatories for different workflows, ie - executing share certificates, ESOP grants, and more
2. Upload the signature image that needs to be affixed or draw/type signatures. These get saved on the platform (this is a one-time activity).
3. Assign the relevant signatory to the respective ESOP/SAR scheme (this is a one-time activity).
4. Whenever new share certificates or grants are queued for execution, the platform automatically assigns the relevant signatory and their signature with a unique hash key to the document (following standard e-Signing protocols).

We have also simplified the flow to execute a single grant at a time, encapsulating the entire journey within three simple steps:

1. Generate a grant letter
2. Sign as company
3. Send employee invite emails + reminders

Test out the new flow and start generating grants!

In case you require assistance in setting up signatories then write to us at help@equitylist.co to help you out.

Admins so far had been using EquityList’s default template for grant letters. While we are proud of our overall design, we felt that allowing our customers to project their company branding and customize their grant letters with the utmost flexibility is necessary.

Under Legal → Templates, admins can create reusable official document templates - select a custom template you created and use it for your ESOP Grant Letters.  

Admins can design these templates on a document editor and add headers, footers, images, tables, and even use EquityList’s template fields to fetch system generated data such as:

• Employee ID  
• Exercise price
• Grant date
• Authorised signature signature placement
• Employee signatures
• Number of units, and so on ...

We are working on an in-line editor feature as well that will allow you to edit and design your custom grants in real time on the EquityList platform - this is available in beta and we’d love to hear your feedback. In the meantime, get started with uploading your fully customized .docx files and issue grants!

Marking employees as terminated and performing post-termination actions has now gotten easier:

• Easier UI and flow to terminate employees in bulk
• Seamlessly switch employee dashboard access from company email addresses to personal emails post termination
• Uploading a .csv sheet for terminations

Managing shareholders and employees across multiple entities so far has been an exhausting and broken experience for most teams. Your workflows and compliances get even more complex when you need to manage cross-border entities across different geographies.

We’re excited to announce multi-entity management support for EquityList customers! You can now track shareholding and stock option plans across different entities through a single dashboard.

• Track and manage cap tables across your parent and subsidiaries
• Manage multiple stock option pools across different entities
• Set different permission levels for each entity
• Request valuation reports across US (409A), India (Registered Valuer/Merchant Bank) and other geographies (on request)
• Download individual reports for different entities

You can reach out to your account managers or email us at help@equitylist.co in case you want to learn more and set this up.

Save countless hours of internal accounting and report management by downloading expense reports directly from your dashboard!

We spent some time with customers to further improve Expense Reports and now:

• Cost accrual is done at a more granular level - basis the number of days leading up to a vesting event instead of the number of months
• Cost reversals for terminated employees are reflected against each unique grant allocated to them

Give it a shot, we'd love to hear your feedback!

We spent some time with customers to further improve Expense Reports and now:

• Cost accrual is done at a more granular level - basis the number of days leading up to a vesting event instead of the number of months
• Cost reversals for terminated employees are reflected against each unique grant allocated to them

Give it a shot, we'd love to hear your feedback!

Employees can now easily switch between their desired currency preferences on their dashboards.

While it’s still possible to set a default currency setting for your employees from your company dashboard settings, employees now get the added ease of switching between currencies seamlessly.

We have a new e-signature uploader with better UX. You can now quickly resize your e-signatures with better aspect ratios without worrying about resizing them yourself!

Intercom in-app chat is now embedded in our web app for easier and quicker interaction with our support team! Stay tuned for feature releases and easier FAQ support directly through Intercom.

You can now grant ‘cap table’ only access to your team. With this permission, they could only view and perform actions on the company’s cap table, shareholders, and data rooms.

It’s never been easier to navigate through complex cap tables and view historic versions at a click. You can track all your prior convertible securities, secondaries, and ownership changes.

Note: Funding rounds need to be mapped accurately to share classes and transferred share certificates for you to view the historic version. You can reach out to us in case of any assistance.

This feature provides an additional layer of security and accuracy to ensure that all grants are reviewed by an authorized signatory before their execution and issuance.

• Company admins can restrict e-signing capability for ESOP/SAR permission levels
• ESOP managers can now queue multiple grants for signatures and send an email notification to authorized signatories to execute the loaded grants
• Signatories simply need to upload their signature and process bulk-grant execution
• Managers can also request authorized signatories to execute one-off grants

This new flow makes it extremely easy for authorized signatories (founders and executives) to execute option grants with an inbox notification.

Reports with enhancements:

• ESOP Scheme Report
• ESOP Grant Report
• ESOP Grant Vesting Report
• SAR Scheme Report
• SAR Grant Report
• SAR Grant Vesting Report

Additionally, company admins will now receive Grant and Vesting reports directly in their inboxes when they click on export options.

When granting ESOPs to your employees, Indian companies need to maintain a Register of Employee Stock Options. This register contains the details of the employee name (holder), grant ID, number of options granted, date of options vested, exercise period, and more.

Please note: This is a statutory requirement under the Companies Act of India, making it mandatory for these registers to be maintained. Your secretarial team can now easily download the SH-6 report with all the mandatory information pre-filled, sharing hours of reconciliation and coordination!

Startups managing their ESOPs on EquityList can now directly download ESOP Expense Reports following the graded-vesting method.

Equity Grants --> Report --> ESOP Expense Reports‍

Startups registered in India should comply with Indian Accounting Standard 102 (IndAS 102) to report ESOP expenses as recommended by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). IndAS 102 establishes uniform accounting principles and practices for all types of share-based payments toward employees and non-employees for Indian companies.

As options/shares are usually granted to employees across a graded vesting schedule, this report needs to account for the cost incurred by the company for each vesting group.

Finance teams end up spending hours collating grant-wise data split across multiple vesting schedules on a quarterly basis. This perpetually recurring activity is highly cumbersome and error-prone when done manually over spreadsheets.

Startups managing ESOPs on EquityList can now easily download month-wise expense reports directly from their dashboard, saving countless hours. These ESOP Expense Reports follow the graded-vesting method and thus make the process much more efficient, leaving no account for errors.

Companies like Slice use these reports for their quarterly filings and save them a bunch of time in reconciling ESOP-related costs for hundreds of grants. Hear it yourself from the slice team:

Startups registered across India, Singapore, and the US can administer and manage their ESOP grants on EquityList. Reach out to us at help@equitylist.co to start your ESOP and cap table management journey.

What's new?
‍

Admins can now select the preferred settlement option for their SAR pool. Choosing ‘share- based' settlement will now impact your fully diluted cap table, whilst cash won’t.
‍

Company admins can now easily regenerate vesting for grants in bulk.

‍

What's new?

• Bulk upload shareholders: save time and instantly upload bulk shareholders in one go!
  
• Bulk upload of share certificates: bulk upload multiple share certificate information in one go!
  ‍

We released new features to elevate your SAR management experience on EquityList:

• New permission level for a SAR Manager: now invite team members to only manage SAR plans and grants.
  
• Add units-to-share ratio in your SAR pool: Like other option plans, you can now add units-to-share ratio to increase the number of units in the SAR pool.
  
• Bulk upload SAR grants: You can now bulk upload multiple SAR grants at once via a CSV sheet
  
• Grant Letters now mention the role: Many startups are issuing SAR grants to employees, advisors and contractors. SAR grants will now mention the designated role of the recipient

Employees will now receive EquitySlips on completing either a time-based or a performance-based vesting event.

Vesting events signify a considerable milestone in the employment journey but often go unnoticed and un-celebrated. Many companies report that employees mostly lose track of their vesting cycles and thus aren’t able to appreciate their value.

Introducing EquitySlips: Employees will now be notified over email upon completing both time-based and performance-based vesting events, breaking down the number of units vested on a particular date along with their estimated values:

• EquitySlips get generated on vesting events for both ESOP and SAR grants
• EquitySlips get customized with your company logo
• All grant-level values are fetched directly from the platform
• Depending on the vesting schedule of the grant (monthly, quarterly, or yearly), the slips will get triggered accordingly
• Employees can also find their EquitySlips in their employee dashboard

We further intend to add insightful information on these slips to keep employees informed about the performance of their grants. More updates on this soon.

Admins can now mark grants as lapsed for terminated employees post their expiry without the EquityList team’s assistance!

You can also track upcoming expiry for terminated employees due to time-based or event-based expiries (ie - board approval, not participating in a liquidation event, etc) and lapse the vested units that haven’t been exercised.
‍

• Lapsed units go back into the pool and the active grant gets canceled
• Employees now get an email when marked ‘terminated’, listing all their active grants and their corresponding expiry period
• Upon ‘lapsing’ of units by a company admin, all the admins get notified along with the employee with an intimation of the same
  ‍

Note: the platform will not automatically lapse units unless approved by an admin.

‍

When terminating an employee, the platform will prompt you to add the exercise period if you haven’t set one by default. You can add an Exercise Period on both the scheme level and on a grant-by-grant basis in case of any exceptions.

CCPS is a type of preferred share/stock that gives holders the option to convert their preference shares into a fixed number of equity shares of the issuing company after a specified date.

You can now add up to 6 decimal places for CCPS:Equity ratio when setting up a new share class.

‍

• Clean UI and platform experience, easier to navigate
• Actions Board added to highlight any pending actions from an employee’s end or important company notifications
• Enhancements to data validations when submitting a new Exercise Request
• Revamped ‘Value Calculator’

• You can now use the admin activity log to audit and investigate admin-related events
• View records of actions performed by individual admins across different suites with corresponding time stamps
• Apply admin-wise filter and export as a .csv file

• Track the number of grants executed, pending, or in the draft stage
• Breakdown of reasons for pending grants that require your immediate attention
• Number of employees invited
• Data Room usage and view count
• Investor Updates sent, and more.

We have currently released a beta version and have focussed on Equity Grants, Investor Communication, and Data Rooms for the time being.

We plan to add a lot more insightful graphs and metrics in the coming days to empower your equity management oversight and decision-making.

• # of new grants issued and breakdown of their status
• # of new share certificates issued
• Status of pending grant executions
• Data room activity
• Investor update activity