This article provides a brief description of the release notes for important new features and enhancements to the Shoobx platform. Updates to this article will happen in parallel to the Shoobx development schedule, and will be published every two weeks.
December 20, 2019
General Updates
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We now require investors to confirm their address and team when accepting a relationship to prevent issues when investors need to sign documents during a financing or other event.
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We have changed the Board Approval for the Form of Electronic Certificate so that it is no longer dependent on the completion of the Post Incorporation workflow. Now, the company board is confirmed during the Incorporation process instead of the Post Incorporation workflow.
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A new fix was added that allows for consultants to be named as managers in Offer Letters and in company Org Charts.
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We have added support for the new W-4 document.
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We have made changes that correctly filter company policies as they apply to their respective employee groups.
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Company setup panels were fixed so that the panels properly disappear when all component tasks have been completed.
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A fix was implemented so that subfolders will be searched when a user searches in a folder in the Data Room.
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A new fix was added so that all exported ZIP files can now be opened by the Windows ZIP extractor.
December 6, 2019
General Updates
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We have now added the total number of outstanding shares on a grant to the checkpoint step of our "Termination" workflow, instead of showing the total size of the original grant.
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We have built in additional detail to our Cap Table export. When downloaded, new worksheets will contain a full breakdown of what has happened with granted shares and options (e.g. how many were exercised, repurchased, forfeited, or transferred) and, for grants that no longer have a net effective issuance, these will also appear in the worksheet for historical purposes (even if they aren’t reflected in the current Cap Table, they will appear in the downloaded report).
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A fix was made in the EIN (Employer Identification Number) filing workflow for companies that did not incorporate on Shoobx.
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We have also changed the document sharing options so that expired stakeholders no longer appear as viable users in the document sharing module.
November 22, 2019
General Updates
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We have now enabled an auto-approval mechanism for matching email domains. New relationships with users whose email is part of the known domain will now be approved automatically, such as for law firms on Shoobx.
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We have streamlined the fund initialization workflow, so that the investor experience is more intuitive. In this process, investors are can customize their own signature blocks.
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A new description is available for the Add Employee workflow. Users can now indicate whether the new employee should go through onboarding or not. This change is on the same screen as the offer document selection, and it makes it easier to understand whether an Offer Letter is required or not, depending on the onboarding requirements for the new employee.
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We have built a new feature that allows for cap table editing for share grants. This tool includes validation measures to protect against user errors, and only works if every document in the cap table entry "bundle" was uploaded (editing is not allowed if any documents were generated in Shoobx).
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The Board and Stockholder consent Workflows now allow for the inclusion of documents created as part of the process as exhibits.
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We fixed an issue with the Add Employee process, so that rescinded Offer Letters will now complete automatically, so that the offeree is no longer able to sign the rescinded Offer Letter.
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We fixed an issue with document names, so that quotation marks in custom section titles no longer break document editing.
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We have adjusted the ASC 718 report to correctly account for grant amendments.
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A fix was added for the process wherein a user is required to edit the forms in HR management because the new title matches the title of another form.
- We have also fixed the Share Documents process for third party users to ensure the documents reach the third party.
November 8, 2019
General Updates
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Additional improvements have been made to the document editor.
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Document customization can now be disabled on a workflow-by-workflow basis. When this is turned on, review and edit steps are not presented to the workflow owner.
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The Grant Shares workflow was updated so that it cannot proceed if vesting schedules that include acceleration have not included details on such acceleration.
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A new Shoobx-to-Carta synchronization workflow was launched, to update Carta capitalization tables after users complete Bridge Notes or SAFEs in Shoobx.
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Users without a recovery method (like an email) can now use a different method to recover passwords.
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The "Request Additional Team Members" process for third-party teams will no longer show up as a workflow with no outstanding actions for a user.
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The "Name Search" functionality during the "Incorporation" workflow was removed in order to better operate alongside Delaware regulations and name database functionality.
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Sidebar items have been reordered and stakeholder lists have been moved to the bottom of the page to enhance and facilitate the user experience.
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A fix was released to address issues with entities that started as Data Room reviewers and became entities that are required to sign documents.
October 25, 2019
General Updates
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A new alert was added for users approving a workflow. Any custom text added to a document during the "Review and Edit" process will now include a notification, so that users can identify this information more easily.
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A new credential gathering process for Carta users was added, which will allow for automated periodic synchronization of the Shoobx cap table with Carta, and allow for re-uploading of cap table data as needed.
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Preferred stock can now be split (in addition to the existing common stock split process). Previously, Shoobx only allowed for changes in the conversion price of preferred shares. Additionally, users can also upload an amended SIP as part of the split process.
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Company policies appear in the correct "My Documents" folder so that employees have access to them.
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Equity financing workflows will now refresh the list of documents at the Checkpoint. Previously, these documents were static.
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Questions were added to the EIN process in accordance with IRS regulations.
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Addresses are now collected for signatories rather than for users setting up their accounts.
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Introduced separate "Job Change" tasks for the Human Resource department in the "Employee Task Report" section. Now, a set of tasks that an HR person needs to complete in connection with a job change shows up in a single list for the HR assignee and can be managed by the HR specialist.
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The editor capacity for document customization was Improved. This now allows for nested lists, paragraphs, and span styles. We have also made our "Exhibit" list dynamic, which means that it will automatically renumber exhibits when they are added to a document.
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With regard to employee terminations, adjustments were made to better address pending stock grants. Now, if a terminated employee tries to exercise shares, the equity user will see this information.
October 11, 2019
General Updates
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"Status" workflow capability will now allow the user to start new processes or end workflows that are in flight. This "manage process" capability is necessary for flexibility during equity financing.
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The "Next Round Planner" can now allow for individual components to be toggled "on" and "off", which allows for changes to be made later in the process.
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Users can now review and change stakeholder information before importing their reports from Carta to populate their Shoobx account.
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The "Add Employee" process now allows for document creation for different regions as defined by employee groups.
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There are now improved restrictions on which documents can be uploaded during the onboarding process, which helps with document organization and management.
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Uninitialized third party entities can now have documents shared with them.
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The "Exercise Options" workflow will now become unavailable at the end of the last day the grant is available rather than at the start of that day, which prevented last day exercise.
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Processes will now self-delete if left without action early in the process for a period of time to avoid outdated workflows from being run.
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The editor for exhibits was fixed so that the users are now pointed to the correct place to edit information about stock classes in their Charter.
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Improvements in the "Share Documents" function have been made so that users will see highlighted areas where their documents have been edited.
September 27, 2019
General Updates
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More context was added to the grant status page for option exercises. The grant approver can now see a warning sign if they are being asked to approve an option exercise for an employee who has been terminated and/or where the employee is attempting to exercise more shares than are vested.
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Starting a process or entering a url for a workflow when not logged into Shoobx will now automatically redirect the user to the login screen rather than showing an error page.
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Signature screens will now allow uploaded signatures for all documents and not just one. SAFEs, for instance, can be generated, and the system will allow for upload of signatures for the SAFE itself and a pro rata side letter separately.
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The ZenDesk "chat" button overlapping the "continue" button in Shoobx was fixed.
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For the "share documents" button, users can now select from groups (that the user can set up) to allow viewing of those documents and access to them once in data room.
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The Data Room was improved to make searching documents by title easier.
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In Legal Review, additional back and forth between counsel and entrepreneur is now possible. Users can now re-send their documents for multiple rounds of legal review.
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Removing legal counsel now has a confirmation page to prevent accidental removal.
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Shoobx now allows users to recover their password with a phone number, rather than just an email address.
September 13, 2019
General Updates
- Added the option to transfer documents from Carta during the Shoobx onboarding process. Users do not have to manually input their cap tables from Carta into Shoobx, this can now be done via upload. Furthermore, new users have the option of leaving Carta and using Shoobx for managing their equity going forward, or staying with Carta and facing a locked screen when attempting to access Shoobx equity workflow processes.
- Updated the SAFE process to reflect Y Combinator's new SAFE documents. Now, pro-rata rights for investors are assigned separately rather than as a default in the SAFE agreement.
- In company org charts, consultants that are entities can now be assigned to a manager.
- More user-friendly “lock screens” were created: when a duplicate process is started, a more detailed message explaining the situation to the user is displayed.
- More user-friendly workflow "discard" screens were created: discard screens now have more context about the affected documents.
- For lawyers that are Shoobx users, the "Counsel Involvement" panel was updated to more intuitively reflect the firm or individual counsel involvement for companies on Shoobx.
- For investment entities, a new “My Firm” panel was added to reflect investor relationships with other entities on Shoobx.
August 30, 2019
General Updates
- Significantly changed the termination workflow to separate the HR and finance portions of the process. A few steps were switched from the HR portion of the workflow to the financing portion. The termination process will also block HR users from terminating a person with in-progress grants if the grants are not far along enough in the process of acceptance (i.e. the grants have not received approval from the Board). These grants are also now correctly picked up by the termination process and reported correctly in the cap table.
- Improved the onboarding process so that companies that do not have lawyers cannot begin processes that require legal counsel. As always, these locked processes become unlocked once a lawyer is hired.
- Company organizational chart now has the option to include consultants.
- Addresses are collected as a part of the signing process as opposed to part of the onboarding process.
- Documents that users do not have access to view no longer appear to these users as though they can be downloaded (when they cannot).
- Shoobx will now reflect when someone you have invited to be a user in your account declines the relationship, or when you have added a user but they have not been invited yet. Shoobx now also allows you to filter users and entities by "declined" and "not invited."
August 16, 2019
General Updates
- Any lawyer invited by a company during the onboarding phase will now have permission to assist in onboarding work.
- A bug has been fixed so if a client looks at the status modal for the Grant Shares workflow on the step where a grantee must accept, the Discard button no longer appears.
- Other backend improvements were made to improve future performance.
August 2, 2019
General Updates
- Equity financing document template improvements were completed
- Uploading a signature page instead of signing electronically is now faster. During the execution phase of a workflow, if a user decides not to sign electronically, the process to upload their signature page now only asks for the date of the signature as additional information.
- The Legal Services for the Shoobx “Corporate Package” application workflow was completed. This new Legal Services program joins our existing "Year One Package" that was already offered. The Corporate Package provides a fixed-fee legal representation offering for companies that incorporated outside of Shoobx and have fewer than 21 workers.
- Legal review of generative stock certificates was implemented for the upload "Grant Shares or Options" workflow. In the scenario where documents were uploaded, but the stock certificates are generated in Shoobx, the workflow now offers legal review at the checkpoint.
- A bug fix was implemented so that the toggle button that allows switching between My Workflows/All Workflows works again.
- The "Cancel Grant" workflow has been improved so that the cancellation date is not permitted to be before the date of the grant.
Onboarding Improvements
- The user running the onboarding process can add someone else to help with that workflow, allowing them to take over an in-flight process to finish or edit it.
- Reviewing completed processes at the end of onboarding is now easier; previously, to review information that was entered, users had to restart processes. Now, modals have been added with summary information for all processes, and users no longer have to reopen the workflow to review the information they've provided. If they do want to reopen a workflow, they will be sent into the workflow with data pre-populated.
- Pre-populated data is reflected in a new progress bar. The progress bar provides visual indicators for processes that have been reopened.
July 19, 2019
General Updates
- Improvements were made related to the equity financing workflow. Document template and process improvements were completed, including a reconciliation step for counsel to address any changes made to the documents post-signing and a consolidated email composition experience.
- Companies on Shoobx can now apply for an EIN directly from the platform. Shoobx provides instructions for completing the EIN application form and handles relevant communications with the IRS.
- Workflow checkpoints were improved so that fields no longer disappear when clients navigate between sections in the document editor.
- An issue that prevented email reminders being sent to individuals whose companies opted to have employees complete their W-4s and I-9s in Shoobx was resolved.
July 5, 2019
General Updates
- Added the ability for users to update stakeholders before they have been initialized. This means users can now:
- Convert stakeholders from individuals to entities
- Update names and email address for uninitialized stakeholders
- Add stakeholders without sending them invitations
- Third-party "review and edit" is now available in the Bridge Note, NDA, SAFE, consultant, and advisor processes
- Pro-forma export from the planners shows how Shoobx did the work to calculate the price per share
- Editing documents from the sidebar will now create a revision of the document (a revision tells the user who made what changes).
- Entities can sever relationships with companies that have invited them to share documents
June 21, 2019
General Updates
- Exercise Shares process now has dynamic payment options. These options can be set when the original Stock Incentive Plan is fed into the system.
- Various bug fixes have improved the usability of the previously released HR Forms features.
June 7, 2019
General Updates
- Legal Services on Shoobx is a new feature that allows customers to apply through the Shoobx platform to participate and, if accepted, execute their engagement letter with a Shoobx-Certified Attorney.
- From the Equity Financing, the investment coordination workflow is streamlined for when an investor has multiple investments in a round (these investments might be via conversions and/or brand new money).
- The NDA workflow was improved in the case where the company sends an NDA to a third party and the third party rejects the NDA.
- Weekly workflow reminder emails are now correctly configured and active.
Document Reviewing and Sharing Updates
- Button options to send documents for third-party review and to share documents are now combined to reduce confusion and present the full menu of sharing options.
- Users can now select which of the documents they want to share, or if they want to share all of the documents
- Users can now select if they want to share for viewing only (PDF access) or if they want to share for editing
- Users can now customize emails to the recipients the documents are being shared with
- Users can now also create new, previously non-existent users from the “Share” menu. New users can initialize their accounts and then review the shared documents.
Equity Updates
- Acceptance date for grants is now on the cap table export.
- Issue was fixed where grant dates were in UTC instead of in the time zone of the granting entity.
- Support for custom vesting cliffs for grants was added. Now when users set up grants and they specify the length of the cliff, they have the option to enter a cliff that is a custom number of months.
- The ability to supersede an existing Stock Incentive Plan was updated and improved to allow users to account for different ways of accounting for leftover shares from the old plan
May 10, 2019 and May 24, 2019
HR Updates
- Settings can now be configured based on employee type. All Employee Lifecycle workflow configuration has been centralized, and it supports configuration variation by employee group concept.
- Users can now define different employee groups as well as sub-groups.
- The entire lifecycle engagement with the company will be defined based on which employee group a user is a part of.
- These capabilities support non-US employee lifecycle variations, so that employees in different regions can have completely different onboarding, job change, and termination experiences, including configuration of behavior, templates used, processes available, onboarding/offboarding tasks, and more.
- Custom offer letters/employee confidentiality can now be encoded; this is a service that clients can pay an additional hourly fee to get set up.
- PDF form completion infrastructure was improved.
- Creating new forms now has a revisioning structure: if you make a revision, the old process in flight will use this new revision to avoid problems that could result from using the old revision.
- Updated contingency forms allow users to curate what onboarding processes look like in different areas for different employees.
- This includes uploading a PDF and setting up forms with custom form fields. The client can use the Shoobx widget to define the client's own customized fields.
- If the client is using an uploaded acro form PDF, Shoobx will pick up these acro fields automatically and use that as a starting point.
- The company forms and information tab allows clients to define what documents the company wants to make available to different employee groups within “My Documents.”
- When clients set up forms, there is an option to set it up as an employee visible process that can be run at any time.
General Updates
- Improved user experience when defining relationship with a new investor
- Clients can now select funds (existing or new) and not just firms, when dealing with inviting an investor to Shoobx
- Clicking “continue” after entering a misspelled fund name will now prompt a “Did you mean…” modal displaying similarly-named entities
- Stock purchase records and certificates are now updated during the signing flows of the Equity Financing workflow instead of waiting until after everyone has signed to update
- Workflows Dashboard panel now updates when a new notification in addition to the existing behavior of the update details also being available in the “Notifications” dropdown menu
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Users can now be referenced across workflows prior to the end of the workflow; companies can also manage when users that were never exposed should be deleted
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In the Post Incorporation workflow, the Consent in Lieu of First Board Meeting document pulls founder names from the Stock Subscription Letters, which results in updated names being used (as an example in the case the founder has diverted their stock to the founder's personal entity, Shoobx will now pick up on this update).
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Stock Incentive Plan now has a configuration for uploaded plans that support grants to entities (which is generally not permitted).
April 26, 2019
General Updates
- Shoobx now has a KISS (Keep It Simple Security) workflow that supports uploading a KISS that's already been created and signed outside of Shoobx. The workflow automatically updates the cap table to include the KISS.
- The Shoobx Next Round Planner now requires a new class to be defined before allowing users to continue on in the workflow.
- Improved messaging on the Next Round Planner lets users know that when they have a convertible instrument with a custom language conversion discount, Shoobx cannot automatically make calculations for the next round.
- The Cap Table Excel export now has a comment if a grant has custom vesting. This makes custom vesting clearer and more obvious.
- The data room index export no longer includes fragments of documents (e.g. single resolutions) that are not in the data room.
- Improvements were made for when a signatory rejects signing an uploaded document in the "Sign External Document" workflow. Now, if a new user rejects a relationship request and declines to sign the document, the requester is shown a new page with options to either continue or discard the process.
- Users are now emailed when someone assigns a workflow to them.
April 12, 2019
Improvements to Equity Management Features:
- Cap table improvements now allow edits to the cap table to be made directly from the cap table screen. Users can initiate workflows from the cap table screen that result in the cap table line items being changed.
- Improvements to how stock certificates are created mean they do not appear in the stock ledger until after legal review has approved them.
- Terminated employees and consultants can now accept ISO and NQO grants.
- The termination workflow allows the driver to address open equity workflows related to the terminated user before completing termination (there is also an associated wait step to track the progress of open equity workflows).
General Updates
- Terminated employees will no longer receive weekly Shoobx reminders.
- Users now have the ability to re-use stakeholders as soon as they are created in processes. In other words, users don't have to wait for the process that introduced a new stakeholder to finish in order to select it in other process.
March 29, 2019
General Updates
- Improvements were made so that Shoobx does not pre-seed grants to entities based on promises in consulting agreements and advisory agreements
- Removed autosave from the portfolio scenario planner and added exit dates for context of the XIRR (internal rate of return calculation)
- Legal counsel notifications at the end of a workflow are now only sent if the process is generating agreements
- For Paylocity integration, Shoobx now shows alerts when Shoobx cannot push salary data to Paylocity
- Shoobx now supports vesting acceleration for grants in the cap table
- Shoobx now shows the correct repurchase price after stock splits
March 15, 2019
General Updates
- Improvements to the investor portfolio view allow investor users to plan exit scenarios for each company and to see the Internal Rate of Return on their investments
- New Investor Transaction Report shows equity transactions that investors have made across all of their entities on Shoobx
- The ASC 718 workflow creates a new and improved Excel report with more calculations and explanations
- The Amend Consultant or Contractor Agreement workflow is now available. It can generate an amendment if the original agreement was generated in Shoobx. This new workflow is useful to memorialize changes in compensation, end date, and/or the description of services to be performed.
- Cap Table Excel Export now includes new columns in the "Common" tab. New columns include: "Vesting Type," "Vesting Commencement Date," "Vesting Cliff," "Vesting Period," "Vesting Frequency," "Stakeholder ID," and "Grant ID"
March 1, 2019
General Updates
- Users now have the ability to request Counsel review at the checkpoint in upload processes
- Users running the "Additional Bridge Note Closing" workflow will now receive a clarifying message if there are no Note Purchase Agreements in Shoobx
- Stock ledger can now be exported even if there are missing stock certificate numbers
- Stock incentive plan process now handles the use case where a company has multiple common stock classes
February 15, 2019
General Updates
- Stakeholders created for hypothetical scenarios in the next round planner no longer appear in the employee directory
- Only one change "company officers" workflow can be run at a time now to eliminate concurrency challenges
February 1, 2019
General Updates
- Improvements made to the next-round and exit-scenario planners
- The self-onboarding process now captures company address information and charter date information during the charter upload.
- "Cost center" and "office location" are now directly editable from the Employee Profile
- The introduction page to the bridge note process has been improved and modernized
- The "Equity Transactions Report" now includes separate tabs with new expanded information. Tabs now include: "Exercises," "Repurchases," "Transfers," and "Track 83(b)"
January 4, 2019 and January 18, 2019
General Updates
- Next-round planner supports multiple classes of common, and conversion of notes with interest
- Launched new workflow, "File Delaware Annual Report and Pay Franchise Tax" which allows clients to use Shoobx to file Delaware annual reports & pay franchise taxes
- Made two entity-to-entity relationship improvements: (a) If any members are pending at the time a relationship is set up, those members are approved and included in the team once setup is complete (b) Funds are listed on the relationship-management page
- Rich-text editing is now enabled on the disclosure schedules
- Users can now select which stock certificates to convert for the deferred track of the "Convert Stock Certificates (Paper or Deferred)" workflow
- Now users can only input so many consecutive wrong passwords
- Weekly reminder emails have been re-enabled. They remind users of open workflows and are titled, "Weekly Shoobx status for <NAME>"
Third parties mentioned and Fidelity Private Shares LLC are not affiliated.
Fidelity Private Shares LLC provides cap table management and other administrative services to private companies and their equity compensation plans.
Fidelity Private Shares LLC
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