OPTIONS & VESTING
Stock option management software
for the whole grant lifecycle
Manage every option grant from offer to acceptance to vesting to exercise or expiry. A vesting ledger records schedules, cliffs, milestones, and accelerations; recipients accept online through a public link that produces a signed PDF; and a pool-utilization chart shows exactly what's committed.
Grant lifecycle
Every grant, from offer to exercise or expiry, in one record.
An option grant is not one event. It is a multi-year lifecycle with legal state at every step, and stock option management software has one job: hold that state honestly. In Vquity, each grant carries its status (offered, accepted, vesting, fully vested, exercised, expired, or cancelled) alongside its schedule and its FMV context, with a detail panel per holder.
- Statuses move offered → accepted → vesting → fully vested → exercised, expired, or cancelled
- Each grant records its vesting schedule and the FMV context it was granted under
- Status changes are logged, so the grant's history is its record, not a reconstruction at exercise time
Vesting ledger
Vesting as a ledger, not a formula in a cell.
"How much have I actually vested?" is the question employees ask most and companies answer worst. Vquity records vesting as individual, dated events (scheduled tranches, cliff satisfaction, milestone completions, accelerations), so every vested option has a line item behind it, and the answer comes with an audit trail instead of a shrug.
- Time-based schedules with cliffs, recorded tranche by tranche
- Milestone vesting and accelerations captured as first-class events
- A daily sync keeps each grant's vested and unvested position current
Online acceptance
New hires accept grants through a link, and a signed PDF lands on the record.
Unaccepted grants are a compliance hole, and chasing signatures by email stops working around the tenth hire. Send a grant for acceptance and Vquity generates the grant PDF and a public, tokenized accept page. The new hire opens the link, reviews the terms, and accepts online, no account and no app install, and the acceptance is logged against the grant with the signed PDF attached.
- Public, tokenized grant-accept page, nothing for the recipient to install or register
- Acceptance produces a signed grant PDF, filed on the grant
- The acceptance event is logged, so "did they ever accept?" has a dated answer
Around the grant
The tooling that keeps a growing option plan sane.
Grants are the easy part. Pools, templates, conditions, and deadlines are where plans drift, so they get first-class treatment too.
Pool-utilization chart
The authorized pool, split into granted-and-vested, granted-but-unvested, and available, updating live as grants are made. "Do we have room for this hire?" becomes a glance, not a query.
Grant templates
Define your standard terms (schedule, cliff, defaults) once in Settings, then start each new grant from the template. Consistent terms across hires, without re-keying them every time.
Conditional grants
Some grants hinge on a condition, a financing or a performance target. Record the condition on the grant itself, so the deal's terms live on the record instead of in someone's memory.
Vesting alerts
Scheduled sweeps watch for upcoming vesting events and cliffs, and for expiring valuations, and post them to the notification center, with email preferences per user.
Exercise and expiry: deliberate, not self-serve
An exercise changes the cap table and has tax consequences for the person exercising. That deserves a deliberate review, not a reply-all thread, so Vquity handles exercises through a dedicated, admin-side approval queue. Exercise requests are entered and reviewed in the workspace; approval runs as one atomic operation that updates the grant and the transaction ledger together, and each request carries its own event log.
To be precise about where the line sits: employees accept their grants online through the public link, and the employee portal shows each holder their own options, vesting position, activity, and documents. But holders do not submit exercise requests from the portal. Exercise entry and approval are admin workflows today. If your plan needs portal-side self-serve exercise right now, Vquity is not that tool yet, and we would rather tell you here than in month three.
Expiry is tracked the same way everything else is: as grant state. Expired and cancelled grants keep their history, so the plan's past stays legible even after people leave.
The records around the grant
Options only stay clean if the records around them do. Every grant is made against an FMV, and Vquity tracks the 409A / FMV lifecycle (effective windows, recalcs, rollback, expiry alerts), so you are not granting against a stale valuation without knowing it. Vquity tracks that lifecycle; the valuation itself comes from your valuation provider. A rolling-12-month grant-activity monitor keeps volume visible for counsel, with the US Rule 701 disclosure marker clearly separated from a full exemption analysis.
All of it feeds the same ledger the rest of the product reads. When a grant is exercised, the shares land in the transaction ledger; when the pool is topped up at a round close, the pool chart moves; when diligence asks for the option-plan history, the grant records, acceptance PDFs, and vesting events are already one story.
Sizing the pool before you promise it
The pool-utilization chart tells you what you have committed; it cannot tell you what you should commit. For the planning half, run your numbers through the ESOP calculator, covering pool size, grant sizes, and what each costs the founders in dilution, before the offer letter goes out. If vesting mechanics are new to you or your team, the Academy's vesting explained lesson covers schedules, cliffs, and acceleration from first principles, and granting options right walks through the operational sequence (board approval, FMV, paperwork) that keeps a grant defensible.
The fastest way to evaluate stock option management software is with grants mid-flight, not an empty table. Load the seeded sample company in the app: it comes with five vesting grants, cliffs and expiries anchored to today's date, and a live pool chart. Three minutes to see the whole lifecycle working.
Frequently asked questions
Can employees accept their option grants online?
Yes. Send a grant for acceptance and Vquity generates a grant PDF and a public, tokenized accept page. The recipient opens the link, reviews the terms, and accepts online, no account or app install required. The acceptance is logged against the grant, with the signed PDF on record.
Can employees exercise their options from the portal?
No, and we'd rather say so plainly. The employee portal shows each holder their own options, vesting position, activity, and documents, but exercise requests are entered and reviewed admin-side in a dedicated approval queue. Approval runs as one atomic operation that updates the grant and the transaction ledger together, with an event log per request.
What vesting structures does Vquity support?
Time-based schedules with cliffs, milestone-based vesting, and accelerations, all recorded as individual, dated events in a vesting ledger rather than derived from a formula in a cell. A daily sync keeps each grant's vested and unvested position current, and the ledger view shows how a grant vested over time.
What are grant templates and conditional grants?
Grant templates let you define your standard terms (schedule, cliff, defaults) once in Settings and start each new grant from them, so terms stay consistent across hires. Conditional grants let you record a grant whose terms hinge on a condition, such as a financing or a performance target, with the condition captured on the grant record itself.
How do I know if the option pool has room for a new hire?
The pool-utilization chart breaks the authorized pool into granted-and-vested, granted-but-unvested, and available, updating live as grants are made. For planning ahead of an offer, the free ESOP calculator on this site models pool size and grant dilution before you commit.
Move your cap table off the spreadsheet.
Shareholders to SAFEs, option grants to exit modeling. One platform, priced by the company and not the head, on web and desktop.
All modules included · No per-stakeholder pricing · Explore a seeded sample company in one click