What’s new?

Australian companies can now manage their entire equity compensation lifecycle - from issuing grants to generating reports directly within Carta that you may file with the ATO. This release introduces ESS stock options that replace generic "international" securities, ensuring your cap table reflects real Australian equity structures.

What’s important about this change?

Historically, Australian startups have been forced to juggle multiple platforms, manual spreadsheets, and expensive third-party filers to manage Employee Share Schemes (ESS). This manual process often led to weeks of reconciliation and compliance uncertainty.

How this makes life better:

• For Founders: You can now issue tax-advantaged options (including startup concessions and non-concessional types) using the same familiar workflows on the platform.
• For Employees: Your team receives clear, pre-filled tax statements directly from Carta, making it easier for them to understand their ownership and file their personal tax returns.
• For Accountants & Tax Advisors: Instead of hunting for data, you can be invited as an admin to access real-time, ATO-ready reports, shifting your focus from data entry to strategic advice.

How does it work?

The entire filing workflow is now consolidated into a single source of truth.

1. Issue & Track: Issue ESS options directly from the grants flow. Every transaction - grants, exercises, and vesting - automatically syncs to your cap table.
2. Generate Reports: With one click, generate ATO-format ESS Annual Reports (Excel/CSV) that include all mandatory fields and automated tax calculations for you to submit to ATO.
3. Distribute Statements: Automatically generate and send ATO format summary statements to your employees.
4. Collaborate: Invite your external accountant or tax advisor to access the data directly, reducing back-and-forth and lowering accounting fees.

How do I learn more?

For more information on how it works, check out this guide.

• Existing Customers: Our team will reach out directly via email to assist with migrating your current securities to ESS types.
• New to ESS? Check your plan - ESS statement and ATO support features are included in Grow & Scale plans.
• Need an upgrade? If you are on a Build plan, reach out to us here.

What’s new?

We have updated salary, total cash compensation, and equity benchmarks for all job areas and specializations across all peer groups. In addition we have included new benchmarks in this release:

• Data Engineering
• Creative Marketing
• Technical Support
• IT, levels 9 and above (including CIO)
• CEO Founder and Non-Founder, capital raised peer groups

Benchmark Trends

In aggregate, salary and total cash compensation benchmarks are slightly higher than our last release, increasing by about 1%. Increases are consistent across stages of company and fairly consistent across levels. Similar to previous updates, specialization level data continues to change more than the broader sample, as sample sizes for these roles are smaller than job area level data.

Equity benchmarks are increasing in aggregate, showing about a 2% increase versus last quarter. Later stage peer groups generally saw the largest increases

What were the largest areas of movement from these benchmarks?

Salary - Salary benchmarks for all job areas and specializations are within 2% of last quarter’s data. Recruiting is the only role that decreased quarter-over-quarter (by about 1%)

Equity - Equity benchmarks are generally within 5% of last quarter’s benchmarks. Product Management is the only role that increased by more, showing a 7% increase.

How do I update my benchmark version?

You can also preview the new benchmarks on your Scorecard by navigating to the Benchmarks page and clicking on the "Preview benchmarks" bubble in the top left.

Here you will have the opportunity to preview the new plan with the updated benchmarks version and assess their impact on your Scorecard before accepting the new plan.

Questions?

If you have any questions about these new benchmarks, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

We're excited to introduce Carta's Intercompany Balances view, a relationship-centric dashboard for tracking obligations across your firm.

Whether you need to track reimbursements to the management company, fund-to-fund balances, or other intercompany liabilities, you now have centralized oversight.

Why is this valuable?

Firms often struggle with reconciling due-to and due-from balances across entities like funds, their management company, SPVs, and GP entities. The Intercompany Balances view improves your firm-wide visibility and operational efficiency with a unified, entity-level view.

Within each entity in Carta, you can instantly check outstanding balances across related entities in the firm. This enables:

• Firm-level Clarity: Easily see net amounts due-to and due-from a primary entity and all related entities.
• See What Ties Out: Balances are automatically categorized as "Settled," "Ready to Settle," or "Pending Review” so you immediately know what’s actionable.
• Visibility into Available Cash: Confirm sufficient funds are available for settlement with a real-time view of entity bank balances.
• Audit the Underlying Journals: Quickly dig into entities’ trial balances for deeper review of intercompany accounts and journal details.

Coming Soon: Bulk Settlement

The Intercompany Balances view is just the first step. We are actively building the next phase, which will allow you to settle multiple balances in a single workflow.

Who is this available for?

This feature is available to all Fund Admin customers.

How do I learn more?

For more information on the Intercompany Balances view, check out this detailed walkthrough.

We’re excited to announce the release of Data Explorer, which offers Carta Fund Administration customers a centralized hub to query, analyze, and export your fund and portfolio company data.

Why is this valuable?

Insights and reporting are often siloed, manual processes that are not integrated into your existing data ecosystem, leading to data freshness, quality, and integrity issues. This release centralizes and streamlines reporting across the Carta platform and turns your data into a strategic advantage. With Data Explorer, you'll access the following benefits:

• Get full visibility: View consolidated data across every fund and SPV in one place for faster insights generation. 
• Create custom reports: Build pivots, dashboards, and visualizations tailored to your needs—no spreadsheets required.
• Benchmark performance: Instantly compare your fund metrics against peers by vintage and AUM.
• Automate data extraction: Easily connect Carta’s data pipeline to your existing systems via a Snowflake secure data share or API-based connector.

Who is this available for?

This is available for all Carta Fund Administration customers. To get started:

1. Login to your Carta account and navigate to Tools & Services > Data explorer. 
2. Access curated dashboards based on common reporting use cases.
3. Reference our data dictionary for comprehensive table and field definitions.
4. Click New > question to initiate a custom query and save it to your personal collection or add to a dashboard.

How does it work?

How do I learn more?

For more details, visit our detailed guides in the Carta Support Center.

Financial Reporting will now include Profits Interest Units (PIUs) in all expense and disclosure reports. 

Why is this important?

Expense accounting is crucial for private companies because it's the only way to accurately measure profitability, ensure tax compliance, make informed business decisions, and secure funding.

How does Profit Interest support in Financial Reporting works?

• New Disclosure Table: The Minimum Disclosures report will now include a new "PIUs outstanding table" if the company has PIUs. This table includes a dedicated "Repurchased" line for greater clarity.
• Partial Repurchases: When a PIU is partially repurchased, the system cancels the original security and issues a new "balance" security. The report will reflect this (e.g., one grant canceled, one new grant issued). A footnote in the "Tranches" tab confirms that expense is not double-counted. 
• Fair Value Override: The report defaults to the Intrinsic Value method for PIU expense. The "Override Fair Value" is still available if there's any need to change it.

Where can I learn more about this?

• How do I use the Minimum Disclosures Report?
• Profits interests outstanding table

What's new

Performance conditions are now supported for three new security types: Profit Interests, certificates and RSAs.

How does it work?

In order to add a performance condition to a security, it first needs to be created via the Vesting and securities templates page.

Once there, navigate to the performance conditions tab, click Create performance condition and follow the workflow.

After the performance condition has been created, it can be attached to any option grant, RSU, certificate, RSA and profit interest unit via the draft workflow or by modifying the vesting schedule.

Once a performance condition has been achieved, it has to be recognized to affect the securities it is connected to.

After clicking the option to Recognize, the required fields have to be filled out to proceed.

If the performance condition was achieved with a payout percentage below 100%, unvested shares will either need to be forfeited or repurchased.

In these case, the original security will be canceled a new one will be issued with the vested shares.

How can I learn more about this topic?

• How to manage vesting and performance conditions

We’re excited to announce that Carta’s Automated Money Movement (AMM) now supports distributions, providing a smoother experience for you and your investors whenever it’s time to distribute returns.

Why is this valuable?

Distributions are an opportunity to strengthen your investors' trust and celebrate milestones together. This release makes your distributions easier to execute and provides timely, transparent payments to investors. With AMM for Distributions, you'll benefit from:

• Streamlined Workflow: Approve a single lump-sum wire in your bank portal—eliminating the need to review and approve dozens or hundreds of individual wires. Our solution handles disbursements to individual investors.
• Real-Time Tracking: Get full visibility into your distribution progress with real-time status directly in Carta, along with email confirmations for investors and summary notifications for your team.
• Timely Operations: Send prompt distributions to your investors and get up-to-date financial reporting by automating key steps of the distribution process.

Who is this available for?

This is available for all Carta Fund Admin customers. To get started:

1. Complete the KYC Due Diligence task on the Carta platform.
2. Notify your Carta fund administration team that you’d like to enable AMM for Distributions.

How does it work?

How do I learn more?

For more details, visit our detailed guide in the Carta Support Center.

We're excited to introduce Carta's integrated budgeting engine, which is built on and stays connected to your actuals.

Management company budgets often get set and forgotten. Disconnected from accounting systems and requiring manual updates, budgets tend to drift from actuals, quickly becoming outdated and outliving their usefulness. We’re changing that.

Why is this valuable?

The integrated budgeting engine transforms your budget from a manually maintained necessity to a connected strategic planning tool. Built directly into your management company, it enables:

• Budget Generation: Create a baseline annual budget in minutes using your historical spend and management fee schedules
• Bulk Editing: Update budgets inline and by applying bulk changes, including splitting annual amounts across months and adding a budget buffer percentage for expense categories
• Edit History: See an audit log of who made edits, what they changed, and when
• On-demand Budget Refresh: Run fresh budget recommendations with the latest data, whenever you want

Who is this available for?

This feature is available for all customers with Carta’s Management Company Administration add-on.

How does it work?

How do I learn more?

For more information on the integrated budgeting engine, check out this detailed walkthrough or reach out to your Carta Fund Admin team.

We are excited to share a new feature that gives you more control and speed when managing your portfolio. You can now book new investments directly on your Schedule of Investments (SOI), bypassing the need to contact our team for basic updates.

This new tool is a major step in our effort to open up previously internal processes and give you more control and flexibility over your data, making your operations faster and more efficient.

What’s new?

GPs can now use the new investment booking tool to independently add and update new investments to the Schedule of Investments. The tool supports all major asset classes, covering over 90% of use cases, including: 

• SAFEs
• Preferred & Common Equity
• Convertible Promissory Notes
• Fund Investments

Why is this important?

This feature will streamline your experience, with three key benefits:

• Faster updates: No more waiting for back-and-forth emails. Book investments instantly, right from your dashboard
• Full control: Update your SOIs whenever you need to, 24/7
• Audit-ready records: Easily upload supporting documents and ensure your data is accurate and up-to-date

How does it work?  

Booking a new investment is simple. 

1. From your Dashboard or SOI, select “Make New Investment.”
2. Choose the relevant fund
3. Enter the investment and asset details
4. Provide wire request information, if applicable
5. Upload your investment documentation
6. Submit

How do I learn more?

Contact your Account Manager or Fund Admin team to learn more.

What's new?

A new self-service workflow that allows company administrators to manage equity plan pour overs directly within the platform. 

A pour over allows available shares from a prior equity plan to be moved into a new plan. This new feature provides a guided flow for admins to initiate, review, and execute the transfer of shares between plans without needing to contact support.

In order to create a pour over admins will navigate to Manage Equity > Equity Plans, where they will find a new Create pour over button. You need to have to active plans in order to be able to perform the action.

After clicking Create pour over, a modal will open explaining more about the tool and provides tips, such as to perform the pour over in sandbox first. This is as a great way to model the changes before doing it in the live account.

After clicking Let's get started, enter the pour over details. Awards issued and plan amendments after the pour over effective date should be zero for the pour over to be executed. Click Next: Review and confirm to move forward.

Review all the pour over details and click Confirm pour over to execute the action.

Who is this available for?

This feature is available to all Cap table clients. Users will need full access permission to perform these actions.

This support article offers a comprehensive step by step process of the workflow as well as frequently asked questions about the feature.