We’re excited to announce our enhanced exercising flow coming early next week!

The updated in-product experience aims to help employees feel more confident throughout the process and reduce the finance and HR team’s burden of managing (and answering questions about) option exercises.

To begin, your company must have online transactions turned on in Carta. Once they do, all you need is:

• A US bank account
• ISO, NSO, or ISO/NSO split grants that are vested

As part of the update, we’ve added an Exercise button directly on the Holdings page, under the new vesting chart. Click on the button to begin.

Once you’re ready, Carta will guide you through a step-by-step process that includes:

• The ability to select which grant and how many shares to exercise
• Estimated tax breakdowns to help you understand your obligations at the time of exercise and the end of the fiscal year
• In-flow profile and payment management to streamline the exercising experience without friction
• Autofilled 83(b) election form for employees who early exercise
• A clear timeline of next steps you should look out for before the shares are in your portfolio

Have more questions about your equity? Click here to learn more >

We’re releasing a new vesting report for ISO, NSO and split grants! It lives under the Capitalization section of your Reports page.

In this update, we’ve introduced:

• A vesting report for ISO, NSO and ISO/NSO split grants
• Added a ISO/NSO column for the Exercised and Settled report

On top of that, we allow companies to generate the report for all their employees or for an individual.

Read more on Carta’s reporting capabilities >

We’re releasing an update to the iOS app to support ISO option exercises!

To begin, you will need:

• An ISO option grant
• To be a US resident
• To link a bank account for ACH-based payments

Once you’ve installed the latest version of the app, head to the option grant that you intend to exercise. If exercising is available, you can click on the blue “exercise” button to begin.

Confirm that you’re currently a US resident to help the platform guide you through your potential taxes correctly. Before exercising, it is recommended that you consult your personal financial advisor or tax professional to make sure exercising is right for you.

Once you confirm that you’re a US resident, you’ll be able

• Choose the number of option grants you want to exercise
• The bank account that you want to pay with
• And ensure your portfolio profile is up to date

Once you’ve filled out all exercised details, you’re now ready to exercise. Before clicking “Exercise”, ensure that you read the terms of the exercise, review all linked documents, and agree to the withdrawal of funds to pay for the exercise.

After you submit the exercise request, the issuing company will approve the exercise request, which will initiate the funds transfer from your bank account to the company bank account. Lastly, the resulting certificate will be created, signed by the officers, then sent to you to accept. You’ll receive email updates from us as your option exercise progresses.

Don’t have the app yet? Get it now!

We’ve made improvements to the ASC 820 valuation workflow. Now when you create a new valuation, you will be able to run through different scenarios, generate reports for each scenario, and select which scenario you wish to use as the final version in your financial statements.

Learn how to create a valuation scenarios >

We’ve made some updates to the law firm dashboard to make it more useful to our legal users. The goal was to provide more top-level information about companies that law firms want to see (e.g. current FMV, company status, or latest round raised), as well as include the total number of users associated with the law firm organization.

We’ve released a new report that details tax withholding events that have been processed on Carta. This report currently shows withholding events in association with these transaction types:

Private Companies:

• NSO Exercises
• NSO - ISO Disqualified Exercises

Public Companies:

• RSU Settlements
• NSO Exercises
• NSO - ISO Disqualified Exercises
• NSO Exercises - Cashless exercise and sell
• NSO Exercises - Cashless exercise and hold

You can find the report under Capitalization > Reports > Equity Plan Analysis > Tax Withholding Report

The report details out Stakeholder ID information as well as a breakdown of taxes withheld in association with each transaction.

We’re making an improvement to the iOS app to support ISO option exercises. We’d love your feedback to make this experience better, so please email us with your questions and comments around this beta release.

To begin, you will need:

• An ISO option grant
• To be a US resident
• To link a bank account for ACH-based payments
• To have an official signature tied to your account (you update it here on your computer)
• To download the beta app on your iOS device

Once the beta app is installed, head to the option grant that you intend to exercise. If exercising is available, you can click on the blue “exercise” button to begin.

Confirm that you’re currently a US resident to help the platform guide you through your potential taxes correctly. Before exercising, it is recommended that you consult your personal financial advisor or tax professional to make sure exercising is right for you.

Once you confirm that you’re a US resident, you’ll be able

• Choose the number of option grants you want to exercise
• The bank account that you want to pay with
• And ensure your portfolio profile is up to date

Once you’ve filled out all exercised details, you’re now ready to exercise. Before clicking “Exercise”, ensure that you read the terms of the exercise, review all linked documents, and agree to the withdrawal of funds to pay for the exercise.

After you submit the exercise request, the issuing company will approve the exercise request, which will initiate the funds transfer from your bank account to the company bank account. Lastly, the resulting certificate will be created, signed by the officers, then sent to you to accept. You’ll receive email updates from us as your option exercise progresses.

We’ve made some improvements to notifications in the Board product. Now, when you publish a consent, you can write a custom message that will be included in the email notification that goes out to your board members.

You can also preview what the email notification will look like to board members by clicking the “preview email notification” link:

We released an update for Stakeholder contact spreadsheet. Now you can see updated emails for your stakeholders.

We released a new report that allows company admins to see a list of outstanding options along with total vested, vested outstanding, unvested and more helpful data that should simplify your reporting.

You can find the report under Capitalization > Reports > Compliance > Options outstanding report.