Stock Plan Administration Software

In the process of researching equity compensation for startups, I came across a product called Equity Focus from .  I spoke with the good folks over at Two Step, watched a demo and was very impressed.

The solution is delivered as a service like Salesforce.com and provides an easy to use yet very sophisticated tool to create and manage your company’s capitalization table.  It allows you to create a comprehensive archive of all the events and related documents that influence your cap table and it provides an audit trail.  The reporting looks very powerful and the prebuilt work flow and forms are comprehensive and flexible enough for most startups.  And to boot, it is priced very reasonable–cheap enough, in fact, that every startup should use this tool or one like it from inception.

One of my favorite features is the export to Excel feature which isn’t unique by itself but the fact that it exports formulas instead of just numbers allows users to easily do "what-if" calculations, for example, to compare two term sheets.

You can also give investors and others read only access to certain things (like the cap table report). 

In the past I have used shrink wrapped, desktop software to manage options as well as just Excel files and shared directories.  I think Equity Focus is superior to both.