Capdesk Helps Tab Media Reduce Investor Reporting Time from 1 Day to 30 Seconds

Despite its relatively small size, Tab Media has a complicated equity structure: it has raised £11.9mil. from both angel investors and venture capitalists, and has an option pool with both EMI and regular options, for UK and US employees respectively. Tab Media kept its complex cap table of 60 stakeholders and multiple share classes in an Excel sheet. However, in this format, it was impossible to keep equity reports accurate and in a single physical location. Eventually, all their reports contained mistakes and often were misplaced. This made Tab Media’s EMI scheme management, HMRC reporting, and quarterly investor updates challenging and extremely time consuming.

Tab Media chose Capdesk primarily because of its effectiveness. “It’s hard to find an equity management system that’s user-friendly. In the past, equity softwares were too complicated, or didn’t do what you needed them to do. But Capdesk just works”, explains Liam Chell, Tab Media’s Head of Finance. The company was also impressed with the onboarding and support services: ’The team is so good at guiding you and helping you navigate through the platform. I don’t think there’s been a time where I contacted my account manager and she didn’t get back to me on the same day,” says Chell.

After just a few days, Tab Media was live on Capdesk and finally had a highly efficient platform to manage equity. ‘It’s really easy to navigate yourself, even if you don’t know much about equity,’ explains Chell.

The company now uses Capdesk to keep all equity reports and filings updated and centralised. ‘Capdesk’s value is about time saving. Before, when our investors asked quarterly for an updated cap table, it would take me a day to reconcile all our reports. But now, I just click ‘export’ on Capdesk, and it’s done in 30 seconds’, says Chell. Tab Media found that this brought financial benefits too: ‘You don’t immediately think of the monetary value, and It’s hard to put a number on it too, because it doesn’t cost anything to make an Excel spreadsheet. But the time I’ve saved by using Capdesk means I can focus on other tasks instead, which obviously saves us money in the long run’.

Having already renewed their subscription, this year Tab Media intend to use Capdesk’s newest features to also execute grants and issue share certificates, fully digitally.