Written for a finance team of three who have never used a cap table system, and do not have time to learn one. Read this once and you will know exactly what to do, in what order, and what you need in front of you before you start.
Unfolding Equity keeps one record of who owns what, and then does the four jobs that record exists to serve: the cap table itself, the ASC 718 stock-compensation expense and its footnote, the Section 16 Form 4 filings for your insiders, and the tie-out that proves the numbers in your 10-Q agree with the numbers in your system.
If you are doing this today, you are doing it in a spreadsheet, and you already know where that goes: the footnote is rebuilt by hand every quarter, the Form 4 clock is watched by a human, and nobody can prove the tie-out without a day of work. That is the problem being solved. Nothing more exotic than that.
One thing, and you already have it: a list of your outstanding equity awards. It does not need to be clean, and it does not need to be in our format. It is usually a spreadsheet someone in your team maintains.
You do not need: a clean file, a data migration, an implementation call, or a signature. You are not committing to anything by importing, and the free workspace does not ask for a card.
The person with the data is often not the person reading this. It is usually a stock-plan administrator, a paralegal, or outside counsel. Download the workbook, send it to them, and let them fill it in. That is a normal way to do this, not a workaround.
Do them in this order. Each one is useful on its own, so you can stop after any of them and still have gained something.
Continue with Google, or just your work email; there is no password to invent. Then tell us the company name, ticker, exchange, and fiscal year end. That is the only typing you are asked to do.
An Excel workbook with a tab per thing (people, plans, grants, vesting), one worked example row in each, and dropdowns on the fields that have to be one of a fixed set. You are not guessing at a format; the format is handed to you.
Fill it in offline, at your own pace, or send it to whoever holds the data.
Nothing is written until you say so. The upload is checked first, every problem is listed with the row it is on, and you can download that list, fix the file, and try again. If a commit does go wrong, it can be rolled back.
This is the step people brace for. It is the one designed to be un-scary.
The cap table, the ASC 718 expense by period, and the tie-out. You did not build any of it. This is the moment to check it against whatever you have today, because if the two disagree, one of them is wrong and it is worth knowing which.
Mark your Section 16 insiders, and the Form 4 two-business-day clock starts being watched for you instead of by you. Set your approval rules. Invite your team; employees never pay to see their own equity.
One record of every award, holder, and vesting schedule. The thing everything else is computed from, rather than a spreadsheet that has to be reconciled to everything else.
Stock-compensation expense by period, with the footnote disclosure assembled from the same grants your cap table already holds. Straight-line attribution; forfeitures recognised as they occur.
Your insiders, their transactions, and the two-business-day Form 4 clock, watched rather than remembered. The rules are shown next to the transactions they govern.
Proof that the numbers going into the 10-Q agree with the numbers in the system. The thing your auditor asks for and you currently rebuild by hand.
No, and if you ever find yourself doing it, we have failed. The import workbook exists precisely so that a person who has ten years of history in a spreadsheet never hand-keys any of it.
Assume it is. Every file we have seen is. Upload it and read the validation report; it tells you what is wrong and where, and nothing is written to your workspace until you accept it.
Yes, and no card is asked for. The paid plan is $720 a month, or $7,200 a year with two months free, for the company, and your employees are never charged to look at their own equity, on any plan.
No. Every table is protected by row-level security in the database, so isolation is enforced beneath the application rather than by it. This is the assumption most worth testing, so test it.
No. It prepares the work and watches the clock. A qualified professional reviews and files. Any tool that claims otherwise for a company your size is overselling.
A finance and accounting leader for a US-listed public company, because the system did not exist to buy. That is the reason it is shaped around a filing calendar rather than around a fundraise.
For information only. Verify with a qualified professional. Not legal, tax, or accounting advice.