Option Grant Administration Template
Three documents and four sheets that track every grant's board consent, vesting and $100,000 limit, then compute an exact exercise deadline the day someone leaves.
Free download · No account needed
Exercise Window Register
[Company], Inc. — as of [date]
One row per person who has left, computed the day the termination is entered rather than reconstructed later from a plan document nobody has open.
| Holder | Termination Date | Deadline | Days Remaining | Vested Shares | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
The deadline that is easy to lose track of
| The plan's exercise window | Whatever your plan states, often three months. Miss it and unexercised vested shares are simply gone |
| The three-month ISO cutoff | Fixed by the tax code, not the plan. An extended window stays exercisable past this date, but shares exercised after it lose incentive-stock-option treatment |
A row with a deadline inside the next 14 days is the one to read first. Once the date passes, the row does not get a second chance.
An option grant is not real until three things line up: a board consent authorizes it, the strike clears the plan's current 409A valuation, and its terms get entered somewhere that computes what they mean on any given day. Most cap table tools store a grant's vesting schedule but not its plan's post-termination exercise window, the deadline that starts the moment someone leaves and is usually gone in about three months. That gap is where vested equity quietly turns into nothing, and nobody finds out until the deadline has already passed.
Ardwick Systems, the fictional sensor company that also appears in the board meeting and investor obligations packs, has ten option grants across two plans and 750,000 shares outstanding under them. Nine of the ten have a board consent on file. The tenth, a 20,000-share grant to an early hire, does not: a signed notice, a countersigned agreement, and no consent anywhere in the minute book. It is the smallest grant on the register, which is the pattern worth remembering, since a missing consent has no relationship to how many shares are involved.
Three people have left Ardwick, and their exercise windows tell three different stories. One's closed seven days ago, forfeiting $112,000 in vested value a $16,000 payment could have kept. A second closes in seven days. A third left under a board-approved year-long extension, which keeps the option alive nine months past the point where the tax code still treats an exercise as an incentive stock option rather than the ordinary-income kind. The extension changes when the option expires. It does not change when the tax treatment does.
What's in the pack
Grant Register
Every grant's plan, strike, and vesting terms in one place, so nothing is rebuilt from memory later.
Consent Tracker
Whether each grant has the board consent Delaware law requires, checked against the minute book rather than assumed.
Vesting Schedule
Current vested shares for every active holder, computed from the grant date, plus the $100,000 limit checked across combined grants.
Exercise Window Register
The exact deadline, vested shares, cash cost, and dollar spread the day a termination is entered.
Grant Procedure
The order that keeps a grant clean: reserve, resolution, notice, register, with the $100,000 check run before classifying anything.
Board Consent Templates
Two ready formats, single-grant and batch, with the $100,000 qualification language already written into the resolution.
Employee Explainer
What vesting actually means, and the exercise-window deadline that turns vested equity into nothing if it is missed.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or download it
Install the pack in River so the agent can read your own plan and grant documents, or take the blank Word and CSV files away and fill them in yourself.
- 2
Send the plan, the notices, and the consents
The equity incentive plan, every grant notice you can find, and the board consents authorizing them, plus your current option ledger for cross-checking.
- 3
Check every grant against its consent
Each grant gets entered into the register and checked against the board consent that authorized it, flagged plainly if none can be found.
- 4
Compute vesting, the limit, and any exit deadline
Vesting Schedule updates for every active holder, the $100,000 check runs across combined grants, and any departure becomes an exact exercise deadline.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. Three documents and four sheets download as Word and CSV files with no signup and no credit card. "Edit with AI" is the optional path where the agent reads your own plan documents and grant notices and builds the registers from them. Other packs sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word documents (.docx) for the grant procedure, consent templates and employee explainer, and CSV (.csv) for the four registers, zipped together. They open natively in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets, with nothing to convert.
What does 'Edit with AI' actually do?
It creates a free River account and installs this exact pack as a private workspace. The agent reads your equity plan, grant notices and board consents, then builds the Grant Register and checks every consent before computing anyone's vesting.
How does the $100,000 ISO limit actually work?
Section 422(d) of the tax code caps how much stock, valued at grant, can first become exercisable as an incentive stock option for one person in one year at $100,000. Anything past that cap is automatically taxed as a nonstatutory option instead. The check runs across combined grants, since a refresh grant stacked on an existing one usually crosses it without anyone deciding to.
What happens if someone misses the exercise window?
Whatever they vested before leaving is simply forfeited once the plan's stated window closes, whether they meant to exercise or not. In the worked example, one person's window closed seven days before this was written and cost $112,000 in vested value that a $16,000 payment could have kept.
Does a longer exercise window avoid the tax problem?
No. A company can grant more time than the standard window as a severance term, and the option stays exercisable, but Section 422(a)(2) still requires exercise within three months of termination for incentive stock option treatment. Anything exercised later is taxed as a nonstatutory option regardless of what the plan's own deadline says.
How is this different from the cap table cleanup pack?
Cap table cleanup reconciles a spreadsheet that has already drifted from years of signed paper. This pack runs alongside the drift as it happens: a board consent before a grant is entered anywhere, computed vesting instead of guessed, and an exercise deadline the day someone leaves rather than the week counsel finds it missing. The cap table cleanup pack is for what already happened.
Find out which grant is missing its consent, and which deadline is closest
Download the blank pack as Word and CSV files, or open it in River and have your plan, grant notices and board consents read first.
Edit with AI