EquityList Product Updates
🌟 Major upgrades to vesting templates
[Note: You’ll now find Vesting Templates under Equity Awards in the left-hand menu.]
We have completely revamped vesting templates for our customers to support customization and complex vesting schedules.
1. When adding/creating a new vesting template, you now get:
- Customizable vesting schedule: Select between ‘Standard’ and ‘Custom’ types to create the desired schedule.
- New duration intervals: ‘Vesting Duration’ and ‘Cliff Duration’, now both support daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly durations.
- Immediate vesting: When issuing a new grant, you can select to immediately vest a percentage of the total grant, e.g. “20% immediate vesting upon grant date and 80% split across 4 years.”
2. Introducing ‘Performance Conditions’:
You can now create multiple performance conditions for vestings and link them with a vesting template.
This feature enables batch creation of grants tied to specific performance requirements, including customizable payout ranges.
E.g. “$3M ARR by Q4 2024, vesting payout between 50% and 100%.”
You can also realize these conditions by specifying the vesting payout (percentage of goal achieved) to vest units in bulk for all grants linked to a performance condition template.
3. Creating custom vesting templates:
You can now completely customize your vesting templates as well. This includes:
- ‘Performance Based Vesting’: Define milestones, vesting percentage, and link performance conditions.
- ‘Time Based Vesting’: Create your own time-based vesting schedules and link them to a performance condition as well.
[Note: When linked with a performance condition, the vesting will only be completed once both time duration and performance conditions are met.]
- ’Manual Vesting’: Create templates where you get to decide when to vest. With this option, vesting events occur only when you manually trigger them at the grant level.
Give it a try!
Accounting for partially signed grants in pool calculation
Earlier, under Equity Awards, we only showed pool calculations and breakdown of units based on fully executed grants. This means that only a grant that’s been executed both by the company and the option holder will be accounted for in all forms of pool analytics.
The problem?
However, a persistent issue arises when some grants remain unsigned by the recipients (i.e., employees), even after the company has sent multiple reminders.
As a result, Grant Administrators spend significant time reconciling data between the pool dashboard and reports
Our solution?
- All pool calculations by default now account for two types of grants: Executed (by both parties) and Partially Executed (pending countersign from the recipient).
- You can revert this change under Company > Settings and toggle off ‘Include partially executed securities’.
💪 We tested this change with a larger set of power users managing hundreds and thousands of grants and - they are loving it!
🗒️ To top it off, when generating options-related reports, you can now also download reports based on the states of the grants - Executed, Pending Countersign, Lapsed, and Draft.
Streamlined options exercising workflow
Customers can now enjoy EquityList’s complete end-to-end exercise workflows. This changes the company and employee experience when undergoing a stock option exercise.
For employees, within their employee dashboards they can now head over to Exercise Requests and create a new exercise request, if enabled by their company administrators.
The new flow allows employees to:
- Select options from various grants which are to be exercised.
- Dynamically visualize the total exercise cost and notional unrealized values of the options.
- Understand tax liability on the exercise and accordingly place an exercise request to company admins.
For equity award administrators, make your way to Equity Awards > Exercise Requests > ESOP Exercises.
- You’ll now see an updated end-to-end flow to process and execute employee requests for exercising stock options.
- This includes key action items of payment reconciliation, getting employee signatures on the exercise form, and releasing a digital copy of the share certificate to them.
- Absolute control for administrators to cross-verify exercise and tax values and propose edits.
[Note: Perquisite tax is the tax on the ‘perquisite value’, which is the difference between the total fair market market value of the shares and the total exercise price paid for them. This is taxable because the difference in value is considered a benefit that’s been paid by the employer.
Notional value is the theoretical or “on paper” value that an employee stands to gain if they sell their stock options.]
Multiple share transfers in a single flow
Cap table admins can now transfer one share certificate to multiple recipients in a single flow. Be it a simple transfer to one shareholder or multiple, our new flow reduces both time and effort to record multiple transfer actions.
You can now:
- Add multiple share certificate recipients in a single transfer panel without disrupting your flow.
- Add new share certificate information for each transfer like 'Certificate ID', 'Price Paid', 'Number of shares transferred', 'Notes', and upload the 'Transfer Agreement'.
- Track the source of a share certificate from Cap Table > Shares > Share Certificates. Sort between different sources such as 'Issued' (for direct issuance) or 'Transferred' (if the certificate originated out of a transfer).
- View the transfer trail within a share certificate.
[Note: In case of partial transfers, the platform will cancel the original share certificate and create a new share certificate entry with the balance shares assigned to the original shareholder. You can always edit the details of the new share certificate in case you’d like to override the Certificate ID.]
Issue and track warrants
You can now issue and track warrants from EquityList
Find them under Cap Table > Warrants.
What does this release bring?
- Clear visibility into tracking issued warrants (recording warrants, exercise, expiry, and more).
- Streamlining administrative tasks associated with warrants like documentation, reporting, and compliance with accounting standards.
- A single comprehensive solution to manage all aspects of equity including stock options, convertibles, RSUs, and now warrants.
[Refresher: A warrant is an agreement between two parties that gives one party the right, but not the obligation, to buy the other party’s stock at a set price, over a specified period of time. Once a warrant holder exercises their warrant, they get shares of stock in the issuing party’s company.]
Revamped cap table layout
We’ve launched a major upgrade to our Cap Table feature and our customers are loving the new user-interface.
- Visualize your cap table at a summary level by navigating to Cap Table > Overview. This section summarizes all outstanding shares, fully diluted shares, capital contribution, and ownership details at both the share class and instrument level.
- Moreover, head over to Cap Table > Fully Diluted to dive deeper at a stakeholder level and view outstanding shares and fully diluted ownership across all security owners: shares, warrants, and stock option grant holders.
- Click on any stakeholder’s name to see a break-up of their ownership across multiple securities.
[Note: Capital raised through convertible securities will be accounted for under ‘Total Capital Raised’.]