Guide

One cap table,
fifty signed documents.

A token fund's real position lives in a folder of PDFs, not in a spreadsheet. Turning that folder into one reconcilable table is a mechanical job with four predictable failure points.

The seven steps

  1. Inventory. List every signed document, its type, and its date. Side letters belong on the same list as SAFTs, not in a separate folder.
  2. Type first. SAFT, warrant, side letter, vesting schedule. Decide the type before extracting a single number, because the fields differ.
  3. Extract to a fixed schema. Same column names for every document. A field that is missing stays empty — never zero.
  4. Normalise dates and currency. Vesting start is either closing or TGE; write down which. Convert amounts to one currency and keep the original alongside.
  5. Apply overrides. Side letters and MFN clauses modify earlier deals. Apply them as explicit overrides, with a note pointing at the side letter.
  6. Derive. Months to full vest, effective price per token, ownership percentage — all computed from the normalised fields, never typed in by hand.
  7. Reconcile. Total committed capital must match the sum of payments actually made. If it does not, you have a warrant counted as a purchase or a duplicate.

Where it breaks

Warrants counted as invested capital. An unexercised warrant is optionality, not money. Adding it to the "amount invested" column inflates every downstream number.

Vesting start assumed. Two contracts with identical "12 month cliff, 24 month vest" can vest three years apart if one starts at closing and the other at TGE.

Side letters skipped. They are short, they look administrative, and they are where the MFN lives. Read them or the table is wrong.

Duplicates from follow-ons. The same investor can appear three times across a vintage. Roll up by legal entity, not by the name on the cover page.

What good output looks like

One workbook. One row per document, with instrument type, investor entity, amount, cap, discount, allocation, unlock, cliff, vesting, pro-rata, MFN, governing law — plus two columns most people leave out: the confidence for each field, and the clause it came from.

The second one is what makes the table auditable. When someone asks "where did this cap come from" six months later, the answer is a section number, not a memory.

Do it once, properly

The job is mechanical: read the same label, find the same clause, put the value in the same column. It takes about twenty minutes per document by hand, which is why funds with forty deals never finish it. It is also exactly the kind of work that should be done by a machine and checked by a human, not the other way round.

Send the first one free →

Related: SAFT fields · warrants vs SAFTs