A cap table template — a structured spreadsheet tracking shareholders, ownership percentages, and dilution — is the default starting point for most early-stage startups. It costs nothing, requires no onboarding, and for the first few months with two founders and no outside investment, it genuinely works. The problems start when complexity enters.
Everything corporate in one place — no spreadsheets.
Set up your company's cap table in minutes.
Everything corporate in one place — no spreadsheets.
Set up your company's cap table in minutes.
A well-designed cap table template can accurately track who owns what percentage, model a simple funding round by adding new rows, and calculate dilution for a single new investor. If your cap table has three shareholders, no vesting, no convertibles, and only one class of shares, a template may be all you need. Many founders successfully use templates through the first year.
The failure modes of spreadsheet cap tables are predictable: vesting schedules require manual calculation and are frequently wrong; SAFE and convertible note modeling requires iterative formulas that most templates handle incorrectly; version control is non-existent ("final_captable_v3_REAL.xlsx" is a near-universal experience); multiple users editing simultaneously corrupts data; and there is no audit trail, so reconstructing historical state for due diligence is painful.
The right time to move from a template to a cap table tool is before you urgently need to — which typically means before you have convertible instruments outstanding, before you're actively in fundraising conversations, and before you have more than two or three vesting grants to track. Migrating mid-deal is stressful. Migrating when things are quiet takes a few hours. Equafy is designed to import your existing equity structure and take over management from there.
Yes — several are available from law firm websites and startup communities. They work for simple situations. The key is knowing when your situation has outgrown the template.
Shareholders, share classes, ownership percentages, post-money calculations for a single round, and sometimes a basic waterfall model. Vesting tracking, SAFEs, and audit history are rarely included.
For most early-stage companies with fewer than 20 shareholders, migration takes a few hours. Key inputs: current shareholders and share counts, vesting grant start dates and schedules, and any outstanding convertible instruments.
Equafy takes you from cap table template to a proper, auditable equity platform — covering vesting, SAFEs, round simulation, and dynamic equity in one place.
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