In case you missed it: April 2023

This month, we onboarded our first Exit customers, updated our R&D tax credits service, made it easier to manage your option holders, and launched SeedLegals Plus in France – formidable!

Read on to find out more about these exciting updates and what’s coming soon.

Contents

What’s new?

• Option schemes: manage your option holders more flexibly
• R&D claims: we’ve updated our service for the new calculations
• R&D claims: make sure you pre-notify HMRC
• SeedLegals Plus now available in France
• SeedLegals for Investors: better experience for your investors
• SeedLegals Exit: the fast and easy way to sell your startup

Coming soon

What’s new?

Option schemes: manage your option holders more flexibly

When you set up an option scheme, you decide on the scheme rules. But we know that sometimes you want to do things differently from the rules you’ve set – our latest updates give you the freedom to do this.

You can now award high-performing leavers with more options than they’ve accrued via their vesting schedule. You control how many of the leaver’s options return to the pool.

You can also now exercise outside the exercise window on the rare occasions you may need to.

Finally, we’ve levelled up the option holder page so you can toggle between active and past grants, sort your option holders by all columns (name, date granted etc), and added pagination to the table. For companies with many option holders, viewing and managing your holders is a much neater, clearer experience.

R&D claims: we’ve updated our service for the new calculations

For R&D Tax Credits claims covering accounting periods starting on or after 1 April 2023, there are changes to the SME and RDEC rates and to qualifying cost categories. You’ll also need to notify HMRC in advance that you’ll be making a claim.

We’ve updated our R&D calculation to include the new rate changes and cost categories of data licences, cloud computing, payments to clinical trial participants and Externally Provided Workers (EPWs).

Our expert team is fully up to speed on the changes and ready to guide you through your claim.

Read more in our post: R&D tax credits are changing from April 2023 – find out how it could affect your business

R&D claims: make sure you pre-notify HMRC

From April 2023, companies claiming R&D tax relief that have never made a claim, or haven’t made a claim in the previous 3 years will need to let HMRC know in advance.

When you make your R&D tax credits claim with us, we’ll check if you need to pre-notify HMRC and if so, we’ll generate a document for you to use as a guide when you’re filling in the form on the HMRC website.

SeedLegals Plus now available in France

We launched SeedLegals Plus in the UK in October 2022 as our best-value package of the services startups need to fundraise and grow. Our teams in the UK and France have been hard at work localising our Plus and Standard memberships for France.

We’re excited to announce that Plus is now available for startups and small businesses across the Channel. Here’s a taste of what’s included in SeedLegals Plus for France:

• No engagement fee when you start a funding round
  Pay the total balance when you close the round.
• Unlimited Share Transfers and Founder Shareholder Agreements
  Included for Plus members.
• 500€ credit for BSA Air
  Use a BSA Air to take a one-off investment before a funding round – similar to SeedFAST.

We’re also offering a discount for companies that buy both a BSPCE and BSA Advisor option schemes – the combined price is just 1,990€.

Find out everything that’s included in SeedLegals Plus for France: Découvrez SeedLegals Plus : la solution tout-en-un pour votre startup

SeedLegals for Investors: better experience for your investors

We’ve released some tweaks to SeedLegals for Investors so it functions much better for your investors.

Firstly, we’ve improved the experience for people accessing SeedLegals for Investors on a mobile device, and secondly we now take investors directly to SeedLegals for Investors when you share a fundraising document with them.

For example, when your investor gets a notification from you that there’s a document to review or sign, it’s now much easier for them to use SeedLegals while they’re out and about, rather than waiting to log onto their laptop. With a better mobile experience for investors, we hope this will mean you get faster responses from them.

SeedLegals Exit: the fast and easy way to sell your startup

We’ve made it as easy to sell your company on SeedLegals as it is to do an SEIS funding round. This month, we onboarded our first Exit customers who will soon complete the sale of the companies.

Our Exit service includes all the documents you need to do a share sale – from the Heads of Terms and Share Purchase Agreement to the J30s and new share certificates – with unlimited support from our friendly experts. And of course, it costs just a fraction of what traditional law firms charge.

Find out more: SeedLegals Exit – Sell your company

Coming soon

As usual our dev teams are hard at work on many different projects. Here’s a snippet of what’s coming soon:

• SEIS/EIS Compliance
  We’re improving your experience when you’re doing your compliance.
• Option schemes
  We’re improving how option pools work for all regions.
  And if you have an EMI option scheme, we’ll send you a reminder 60 days before your EMI annual return is due.
• SeedLegals for Investors
  Angel investors will be able to send proposals to companies.

Have your say

Got an idea for us? Is there something we can do better? We love to hear your feedback – good, bad and ugly. Let us know by email: [email protected]

Interested in becoming a SeedLegals member? Head over to Pricing to find the right membership for your company.