Product updates

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.

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.

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

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?
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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.
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• # 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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’

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.

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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.

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

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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

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

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