You can now easily review and approve grant agreements in a few clicks without the need to insert a digital signature.
If you want to issue online grants through Carta but you don't want to sign them individually, you can now use the Grant Approval feature which will allow you to approve one or multiple grants at once without the need of a signature on the company's behalf.
For the purpose of this article, we will use the workflow for option grants as an example. Please, bear in mind that the same process is valid for all types of equity awards.
Enabling Signatureless Granting
1. Navigate to Equity awards > Options > Plans > Add Plan. You can review these steps in detail here.
2. Ensure you select the Granting method as Signatureless granting when creating the plan.
Please note, this feature will not be available for existing plans, you will need to create a new one.
3. Once the plan is successfully created, add a document set for this plan. Please follow the steps in here but note that whilst creating the document set, you will not be given the choice for the type of agreement as this is automatically chosen as a Grantholder only signed Agreement.
Before uploading your agreement document to the platform, make sure all the required placeholders under have been added to the document.
| The placeholder replacing the company's signature is <<Carta:ApprovalStamp>> |
The text shown on the document will read as follows: ''This document was approved through Carta by (the name of the approval administrator) on behalf of (the name of your company) on (the date the grants have been approved and sent for signing).''
4. Grant approving rights to the administrator who will approve and send the grants for signing by following this guide. Please note this is the name of the person that will appear on the document agreement as mentioned above as approval administrator.
Single issuance and approval
1. Create the option grant by following these steps.
2. Once you have completed the details of the transaction, if you have approval rights, you can select Send for signing. Tick the box shown below to confirm you have the right to approve the grants on behalf of the company and select Approve and Send.
If you do not have approval rights, you are only able to Save as Draft. The administrator with the approval rights will then be able to approve and send for signing the transactions by navigating to Equity awards > Options > Online issuances > click the Actions Button relevant to the grant and select Approve and send for signing.
The grantholders will now be notified via email to complete their signature. Once done, the grants will be automatically published.
Bulk Issuance and Approval
1. Bulk issue option grants by following the instructions here. Please note, you will need to leave the grants in Draft status after you have uploaded the file, this means, do not complete the last step of publishing the grants.
2. Navigate to Equity awards > Options > Online Issuances > click on Manage grants and select Send for signing.
| Please note, only the administrator with the approval rights will be able to approve and send the grants for signing. |
3. Select Approve and send multiple grants for signing on the next page.
4. Select all or only some of the grants to approve and send for signing. Once selected, click Next.
5. Check the box where you confirm you have the right to approve the grants on behalf of the company. Once you tick the box, select Approve and send for signing.
A confirmation message will then appear on the screen as below:
The grantholders will now be notified via email to complete their signature. Once done, the grants will be automatically published.