Ledgy allows you to open an exercising window, and eligible stakeholders can express their intent through their Ledgy dashboard. After stakeholders express their intent, you, as the Owner of the company, receive their requests and can approve them.
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Company side, allowing users to request to exercise within a specific time frame:
To open the exercising window, go to Equity Plans > Exercising and click on "Add exercising window" in the top right corner of the page.
This will then open up a modal in which you can specify whether or not you would like to notify employees that the exercise window is open, and choose an Opening date for the exercise window to be open.
Include a Note for the stakeholders that will be shown on the employees’ dashboards when the exercise window is open. For example, you could include information about tax implications for different grants, or instructions for payment.
Suppose you choose to enable the window for a limited time. In that case, you can choose the "Effective vesting date", which means stakeholders can request to exercise the grants that have vested up until this date. You can optionally choose the day the exercise window closes with the selected "Closing date" date. If you do not choose to enable the window for a limited time, then the exercising window will have an open end. The exercising window in both cases will open from immediately after you click Save.
You can also easily edit this window after it has been opened by clicking on the Edit icon under "Exercise Requests".
Employee dashboard side, once the exercise window has been opened:
Once the exercise window has been opened, any portfolio user eligible to exercise options (people with vested options) will see a new section pop up in their dashboard telling them about the exercise window. In this section, the Note from the company will appear as well, if there is one. If you have chosen to notify employees, any portfolio user eligible to exercise options (people with vested options) will get an email notifying them that they can request to exercise during the specified time frame.
They can then request to exercise their vested options (those that have been and will be vested by the effective exercise date defined by the company) by going to their Ledgy dashboard and clicking Request exercise in the first section of the dashboard on the right.
They can then select how many options they would like to exercise and be informed on how much payment is necessary if applicable.
If the employees try to exercise more than they have vested by the effective exercise date, Ledgy will not let them through.
Company side, once they have received a request to exercise:
All requests to exercise from employees are visible on the Exercising page, at the top:
Here, you can hover over the request and click the check mark on the right side to accept the request, or the reject icon to deny the request.
In case of any mistakes from the employee side, you can still edit the date and number of options while you’re accepting the request.
You can trigger the workflow to create the Exercise notice document, fill out the relevant information automatically, and then send the document for signatures. Learn more about it here.
By clicking on the Accept Request button, a new transaction will be triggered and saved on Ledgy in the Transactions page.
Once the transactions are verified, documents signed, and payment (if applicable) is received, admins can publish the transactions, which automatically updates the share register, employee dashboard and equity plan status.
In this short video, you can see this action from both sides, with comments explaining what is happening along the way: