In case you missed it: May and June 2023

This month, we’ve made it easier to see your progress when you’re doing SEIS/EIS Compliance, added reminders so you never miss an annual return for your option scheme, launched SeedSAFE in Singapore and Hong Kong, and made many more improvements.

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

Contents

What’s new

• Speed up your SEIS/EIS Compliance
• Never miss the deadline for your options annual return
• Say goodbye to Covid-19 policies
• New in Ireland
  More choice when option holders leave
• New in France
  Speed up your share transfers
• New in Asia
  SeedSAFE: take an investment before a round
  Transfer shares the easy way

Coming soon

• Take an investment in any currency
• View your progress, at a glance
• Understand your option pool, at a glance

Have your say

What’s new

Speed up your SEIS/EIS Compliance

We’ve released improvements to our SEIS and EIS Compliance services. It’s now much easier to use, with a simplified workflow, at-a-glance summaries, and useful tips to help guide you through.

Our Customer Experience team and plenty of our customers have been asking for this – we’re delighted these updates are now live and ready next time you need to complete the process for your investors.

Find out more about how our panel of user testers helped us polish our designs – see below 👇

Never miss the deadline for your options annual return

Granted EMI or Unapproved options on SeedLegals? We’ve set up automatic reminders before your annual return is due. Every year, we’ll send you the first reminder 90 days before the deadline, giving you plenty of time to create your return and send it to HMRC.

You don’t need to set up the reminders – they’re automatic.

Say goodbye to Covid-19 policies

Happily, it’s sunset time for Covid-19. We offered Covid-19 policies on SeedLegals, to help you set out the measures your company and workplace put in place for the pandemic. And now Covid-19 is finally over, it’s time to put this policy into our archive.

Covid-19 policies are no longer available to create on SeedLegals, but if you created one for your company, you can still find it in your Documents.

Check out the policies available to create on SeedLegals: Company Policies and Staff Handbook

New in Ireland ☘️

More choice when option holders leave

In some circumstances, you and an option holder might want to terminate an existing option grant. For example, because there’s a mistake or you’ve decided to set up an alternative agreement with the option holder.

We’ve updated our option schemes service in Ireland so it’s now easy to fix issues like this: you can now create a deed of termination for an option grant, compliant with Irish law.

Because the document is a deed, it must be witnessed. This is easy to do on SeedLegals, simply follow these steps: How to get a witness to sign a deed

New in France 🥐

Speed up your share transfers

We’ve automated the process for transferring shares in France. This is great news for founders across the Channel because you now can do a transfer yourself on SeedLegals, generating all the legal documents you need in super quick time.

For Plus members, unlimited Share Transfers are included
For Standard members, one Share Transfer costs 250€

Read more: Cession de titres entièrement digitalisée

New in Asia 🌸

SeedSAFE: take an investment before a round

Founders in Singapore and Hong Kong: want to be ready to take an investment whenever the opportunity arises, without waiting to do a funding round? That’s where our SeedSAFE comes in.
We’ve improved and re-released our SeedFAST (our Advanced Subscription Agreement) to include SeedSAFE – our ‘simple agreement for future equity’ and a standard YC SAFE. What does this mean, and what’s new?

🌏 Tailored for Singapore and Hong Kong
Our SeedSAFE is based on the Y Combinator SAFE (YC SAFE) built especially for this region and enhanced to support multiple deal terms like having a discounted valuation and a valuation cap simultaneously.

🔁 Change format in one click
You can toggle seamlessly between YC SAFE and SeedFAST – so if your investor has a preference, you can quickly switch your document to their preferred format.

🪢 Best of both
We’ve combined the best features of the YC SAFE and our SeedFAST. For example, an off-the-shelf YC SAFE doesn’t allow you to add a longstop date, fix the valuation at which the investment converts, or specify the class of shares that the investment would convert into in the next funding round. We believe these are important so we’ve built them into our YC SAFE – and of course, if your investors don’t want them, then you can switch off these terms.

Read more about SeedSAFE in our post: Create your SAFE on SeedLegals

For a demo, book a free call with one of our experts.

Transfer shares the easy way

We’ve updated our Share Transfer service in Hong Kong and Singapore so you can now create, edit, approve and delete share transfers.

Share Transfer in Hong Kong and Singapore is free of charge and it doesn’t come with documents, it simply updates your cap table.

Coming soon

As usual, our team is hard at work on many different projects. Here’s a snippet of what’s coming soon:

Take an investment in any currency

Investor paid you in dollars, euros or another currency? No problem. We’re working on an update that allows you to factor this into your fundraising.

You’ll be able to enter the investment amount, currency and exchange rate, and see immediately how many shares you’ll need to issue to the investor.

When this is live, you’ll be able to talk this through with us before you go ahead to accept investment in another currency. Stay tuned to find out when this exciting update is released.

View your progress, at a glance

The update to SEIS/EIS Compliance (see above) is just one of many improvements we’re making to how SeedLegals looks when you’re logged in.

When you’re doing a task on SeedLegals, whether you’re completing your SEIS Compliance, doing a funding round, setting up an option scheme, or any other task, we want to make it easier to understand exactly where you are in the task:

• know which steps you’ve completed, and what’s remaining
• see an estimate of how long each step will take
• know who has your documents
  For example, if our experts are reviewing them, if they’re with HMRC etc
• go back to where you left off next time you log in
• know what to do next

Look out for the new progress trackers coming soon.

Understand your option pool, at a glance

As well as helping us improve your experience progressing through tasks on SeedLegals (see above), our user testers have helped us understand how best to display option pools for customers setting up and managing a share option scheme.

With feedback from customers, we’re working on improvements so it will be easier to understand at a glance exactly how much equity you’ve set aside for your team, how much is already allocated (as option grants) and how much is remaining.

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]

If you aren’t already a SeedLegals member, head over to our Pricing page to find the right membership for your company.