Check the validity of your data and configure relevant settings prior to inviting your stakeholders to the platform.
Everything on Carta will remain in 'draft' status until you activate your account and publish the data, and unlock a number of new features such as valuations and reports. Your account is in setup mode where draft data is only available to be viewed by company administrators and corrections can be made easily. All stakeholders with active equity holdings will be invited to the platform. Corrections can still be made to transactions however there will be an audit trail and the affected stakeholder will be notified.
| Before activating your Carta account, you should ensure that the data is correct on Carta and that you are happy with your configured settings. We recommend checking the below key areas of the platform before you activate. |
- Initial Setup
- Validate your data
- Valuations
- Company profile
- Settings and Add - Ons and the Stakeholder settings page
- Activate Now
Initial Setup
Navigate to Status > Company Setup.
- Admins: Invite administrators onto the account that you wish to have access; these can include key personnel such as CFOs, HR and your legal counsel.
- Funding rounds: Transactions (eg. share issuances, grant exercises etc.) should be associated to funding rounds to accurately track the amount raised in a given round. These details are important as, if enabled and unless a custom valuation is provided, the latest funding round share price is used to share an equity valuation with your stakeholders. This also populates the graph in your admin dashboard so you can have an overview of the company’s funding history.
- Share Classes: Verify that you have the correct nominal value and votes per share for the share classes. We also recommend checking the total number of shares, share capital and liquidity preferences. You can view this data by clicking on the Add share class button which will redirect you to the Classes page. The liquidity preferences are important for you to be able to accurately use the round modelling and exit modelling reports.
- Stakeholder settings: Toggle engagement emails for stakeholders on and off and configure what they can see on their dashboard, by defining general settings and access levels for each group.
You can find more information regarding the steps and articles with more details by clicking on the information symbol (ⓘ).
Validate Your Data
- Review your settings and add-ons: Add your DocuSign account, adjust signing deadlines and enable different equity modules.
- Preview your stakeholder's dashboard: This allows you to see how a stakeholder's dashboard will look once they have signed up accepted all their securities. To inspect someone’s dashboard, you can navigate to Cap table page under Ownership, click the three buttons and Preview Dashboard. You can adjust what a stakeholder can see in their dashboard by adjusting the stakeholder access settings.
- Review your company admin's access: Add, edit or remove administrators for your account. You can also modify the level of access each administrator has and also assign signing privileges. You can find more information about this process in this support article.
- Test invitation email: Activating your account will trigger email invitations to be sent to your stakeholders. You can check and modify the email template which will be sent to your stakeholders when you activate your account. More information on how you can do this can be found in this step-by-step support article.
- Review your company data: This step will direct you to multiple areas for you to check whether the data present is correct.
- Confirm your data is correct - Once you’ve completed the Review your company data, you can confirm that the data is correct. You will need to do this before you can activate your account.
Balance checks:
If there are any problematic transactions that would prevent the activation of the account such as negative share balances or negative plan balances, these will be highlighted in the Confirm your data step and these will need to be addressed before you are able to activate your account.
| Please note your incentive pool balance will need to be positive in order to activate the account (if applicable). Note: if the incentive pool had a negative balance in the past but is positive as of the current date, this will not prevent activation. |
Valuations
If you have any previous valuations (e.g. AMV and UMV from HMRC), it is important to input them on Carta. You can action this within the Compliance menu, Valuations page and then the Compliance valuations tab.
Company Profile
The information within the Company Profile tab will be visible to investors within the Company Dashboard area.
Settings and Add-ons and the Stakeholder Settings Page
We recommend evaluating all settings prior to going live located on the Stakeholders settings page as well as the Investor relations under Settings and Add-Ons.
|
To check how these settings impact what your shareholders and grantholders are able to view on logging in, take a look at this article. |
Activate Now
Once you have completed all of the steps, and you are ready to publish your data and invite your stakeholders to view their holdings, you can request activation for your account and a member of the Implementations team will activate the account.
You will receive an email notifying you once the process has been completed.