Cap Table

The Cap Table (short for "Capitalization Table"), is a table that shows the amount of shares and percentage ownership of all investors in the company - including founder & employee equity compensation

Overview

A very large part of financial modeling, especially for companies seeking venture capital investment, is forecasting the effect of new future investments and changes to the capital structure of the company. There a ton of reasons why it's important for founders to plan out when they'll want or need to raise new money, but here two that we think are most important:

  1. Understand the effect of future investment on founder, employee, and previous investor equity

  2. Quantify the amount of investor capital the company will need continue operations if the company projects that it will lose money for a period of time while setting up or growing its operations

For those with a bit of finance knowledge, the Cap Table is a part of the Balance Sheet, specifically included Shareholders Equity. While we keep it as a separate feature on the Navigation Bar in Sturppy, adding your forecasted funding in the Cap Table will be reflected on the Balance Sheet. So, if you forecast a $500k equity round in March of next year, when you add it to your Cap Table, you'll see that $500k investment reflected as cash on the Balance Sheet projections.

Cap Table Dashboard

The main page that you'll see when you click on the "Cap Table" section the menu bar will look something like this:

Here you see an example of a very basic cap table populated with two funding rounds - the founding round which included the initial equity distribution between founders and the employee option pool - and the seed round - where the company raised its first round of outside money. On the right side you see a pie chart representing the cap table after including all funding rounds.

From this dashboard you can add a round by clicking the "New Round" button in the upper right hand corner, and you can edit both the rounds you've already populated and the details for each investor by clicking into each individual item.

Adding a Funding Round

Building out a Cap Table starts with adding a new round. In doing so you'll add details like date, round type, funding amount, and investors. The investors involved will then be shown in the cap table.

Given that there are multiple types of funding rounds beyond the basic equity investment, Sturppy provides multiple options for the type of funding round that will require different details when you're adding a new round. Here's what that looks like:

As you can see, you can also add a Convertible Note - a debt/equity hybrid that allows investors the option to convert debt to equity based on pre-negotiated terms (such as a future valuation). It's important to take care to select the correct round type for your situation, as funding rounds can a dramatic influence on the projections in your model.

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