Options, grants & vesting

Tenacap models the whole equity-compensation lifecycle in app, so you can run a company on it rather than just view an imported snapshot. The path is: authorize a plan, grant options against it, attach a vesting schedule, and — when someone exercises — turn vested options into real shares on the cap table.

Create an option plan

An option plan is the board-authorized pool you grant out of. Open the manage panel on your cap table, choose Option plans, and add one with a name (for example “2024 Plan”), its authorized size, and the board-approval date. A company can run several plans over its life — a 2021 plan, an evergreen top-up — and each keeps its own authorized pool. Every grant draws the pool down, and Tenacap shows authorized, granted, and unallocated per plan plus a rolled-up total.

Resizing a plan is a board action, not a silent edit. When you change an authorized pool, Tenacap records it in the plan’s history with a date and a signed change, so counsel can see how the pool grew over time.

Issue ISO & NSO grants

A grant is issued to a stakeholder against a specific plan. From the grant form, pick the grantee and plan, then enter the quantity, strike price, grant date, expiration date, and the grant type — ISO (incentive stock option) or NSO(non-qualified stock option). Tenacap validates that the grant plus everything already granted stays within the plan’s authorized pool.

Standard & custom vesting

Every grant can carry a vesting schedule, built inline as you issue it or attached later. There are two kinds:

• Standard — a cliff plus a linear schedule: cliff months, total months, and a vesting frequency. The classic four-year grant with a one-year cliff vesting monthly is a standard schedule.
• Custom — dated milestone tranches, each with a fraction of the total. Use this for performance or board-dated vesting that doesn’t follow a single linear curve.

Vested and unvested counts are computed, not stored — Tenacap derives them as of today from the schedule, so the cap table and each holder’s view always reflect the current state.

Acceleration, pause & resume

Real grants change. Tenacap records vesting lifecycle events rather than editing past vesting, so the history stays an immutable, exportable log:

• Acceleration — single- or double-trigger. When the trigger fires, you record an acceleration event for a quantity; acceleration only ever raises vesting, and the regular schedule catching up later never double-counts.
• Pause & resume — a leave of absence. A pause stops the linear clock and a resume restarts it, shifting the standard schedule back by the paused months.

Whether a change of control or termination actually happened is your call to record — Tenacap keeps the vesting math itself pure and deterministic, then replays your recorded events on top of it.

Early exercise & recording exercises

If a grant is flagged for early exercise, the holder can exercise options before they vest. Early-exercised shares are issued as restricted stock that carries the grant’s vesting — which is exactly when an 83(b) election matters; see Restricted stock for that filing.

When someone exercises, use Record exercise on the grant. Tenacap draws down the grant’s outstanding options and issues that many shares of the underlying class to the grantee at the strike price — a real issuance on the cap table, with the hash-chained ledger and totals reconciling like any other. The grants table also shows each grant’s expiration clock, flagging grants that are within 90 days of expiry or already expired.

Grant notices

For any grant you can generate a Notice of Grant — a PDF built from the grant’s own terms (plan, quantity, strike, dates, and vesting). The same document powers the e-sign request, so what the grantee signs is exactly what you reviewed. Send it for signature straight from Tenacap; the full signing flow is covered in Documents & e-signature.