Manage equity incentive plans

Create a plan

Open Share classes to manage equity incentive plans. Each plan has a name, an adoption date, an initial reserve, permitted award types, and an optional expiration date. A company can have several plans.

Enter the terms of the adopted plan. Assign an underlying share class where applicable. Options and RSUs identify the plan they draw from; warrants do not draw from a plan. An award can also be recorded outside every plan when appropriate.

Read the plan balance

Authorized

The plan’s reserve adjusted for applicable transfers and share flows from other plans.

Committed

The shares drawn by awards, adjusted for recorded events and the plan’s recycling rules.

Available

Authorized minus committed. These are the shares the plan can still use for new eligible awards.

For example, a plan with 1,000,000 authorized shares and 250,000 committed shares has 750,000 available shares. This simple example assumes no other transfers or recycling events.

The company’s fully diluted count can include the available shares of open plans. Available shares from a retired plan are excluded. Imported awards may leave a plan overcommitted; the app shows that condition instead of rewriting the historical award quantities.

Change the reserve with a dated event

Use a reserve change to record a later increase or decrease. Keep the effective date aligned with the company’s records. The app retains the dated movements so a historical cap table can use the reserve that existed at that time.

A transfer between plans moves available shares from one plan to another. It does not increase the company’s aggregate reserve. The source needs enough available shares on the transfer date and in the current records, and the destination must be open.

A new or enlarged award cannot exceed the selected plan’s available shares. A reserve reduction cannot leave the plan below its commitments.

Understand share recycling

Recycling rules determine what happens to shares when an award is cancelled, expires, is exercised or settled, or when related shares are repurchased or transferred. A rule can return shares to the plan, retire them from availability, or direct them into another plan.

By default, cancellations and expirations return shares. Exercises and settlements keep the shares committed rather than making them available for a second grant. Repurchases and transfers also default to keeping them drawn. These are application defaults; confirm that the configured rules match the actual plan.

Rules affect the balance calculated from recorded events. Review existing awards and the balance before changing a rule. The app refuses a change that would leave the plan overcommitted.

Retire a plan without deleting its awards

Retiring a plan closes it to awards dated after its retirement date. Its awards and history remain. The retirement date cannot precede the latest recorded award or reserve change.

The retirement workflow can transfer available shares to a successor plan and redirect rules that would otherwise return shares to the retired plan. Review those choices against the company’s plan documents.

An unused, unreferenced plan can be deleted. A plan with awards or other references should be retired instead. The app can reopen a retired plan when needed.