Export & open schema

Your cap table is yours. Tenacap exports the whole thing in one click — as a spreadsheet, as a single open-schema JSON file, or as a self-verifying archive — so you can back it up, hand it to your accountant, or walk away entirely.

“One-click export, open schema, no lock-in” is a promise written into our terms, not a marketing line. Every Tenacap account can pull its complete state out at any time, in a format that’s openly documented and licensed so any tool — or your own accountant — can read it without asking us. This article covers how to do it and what you get.

How to export

The export buttons live on your cap-table view. Open the company, find the export controls in the toolbar, and choose a format. The file downloads straight to your machine — there’s no job queue and nothing to wait for. The data is always scoped to the one company you’re looking at.

ScreenshotThe export controls on the cap-table view, offering CSV, JSON, and full archive downloads

The three formats

Pick the one that matches what you’re doing:

CSV — a flattened holdings sheet (stakeholder, share class, quantity, price, issue date) that opens straight in Excel or Google Sheets. Best for a quick look or a one-off analysis.
JSON — the complete cap-table.json: every share class, stakeholder, security, convertible, transaction, and audit-log entry, in our open schema. This is the full picture.
Archive (.zip) — everything above bundled together: the validated cap-table.json, the CSV sheets, your attached signed PDFs, and a MANIFEST.json that fingerprints every file.

What’s in the archive

The .zip is the most complete export. Alongside cap-table.json and the per-entity CSV sheets, it carries the signed PDFs Tenacap generated for you — SAFEs, stock purchase agreements, and the like — plus a MANIFEST.json listing every file with its byte size and a SHA-256 checksum. Those hashes let anyone confirm the bundle hasn’t been altered since Tenacap produced it: re-hash a file, compare it to the manifest, and you have cryptographic proof of integrity.

ScreenshotThe unzipped export archive showing cap-table.json, CSV files, a MANIFEST.json, and attached PDFs

The open, versioned schema

The JSON export conforms to the Tenacap open schema: version v1, published under Apache-2.0, and versioned with semver. It isn’t a private format you have to reverse-engineer — every section is documented field by field on our public open-schema reference, and any breaking change comes with a major-version bump and a six-month deprecation window. The full structure, an annotated sample, and the governance rules all live there.

Backup, round-trip & migration

Because the JSON is the same shape Tenacap reads on the way in, an export round-trips: exporting and then re-importing reproduces the cap table exactly. That makes the JSON or archive a genuine backup — keep a copy in your own storage and you hold a complete, self-verifying snapshot of your ownership records that doesn’t depend on us being around.

The same property is what makes leaving painless. If you ever move to another tool, hand it the open-schema file; if you’re coming the other way, see Importing your cap table. We even publish migration guides that take you away from Tenacap — the point of an open format is that it works in both directions.