How to set up equity approval workflows

Equity approval is rarely one person clicking "approve". A grant usually needs sign-off from the board, an authorised signer for the company, and sometimes the CEO, before it ever reaches your employee. An approval workflow makes that repeatable: the same people, the same order, the same audit trail every time. This article explains what an equity approval workflow involves and how Cake runs it for you.

What an equity approval workflow involves

Most equity approvals move through a few stages, and Cake handles each one:

The approvers and signers - the directors and authorised signers who can approve and sign on behalf of the company. You set these up once so Cake always knows who to route to.
Board approval - the board consent (the resolution that records the board approving a grant) generated and sent for signing from Cake. You can set it as a default on an option pool so every grant routes for approval automatically, rather than one at a time.
Company signature - an authorised signer, often the CEO or a company representative, co-signs a grant on behalf of the company before it reaches the employee.
Electronic signing and tracking - getting the right people to sign, then seeing who has and hasn't from one place.

The rest of this article walks through setting each of these up, then sending your first approval through.

Before you start

Set up your board members and signees first, so Cake knows who can approve and sign on behalf of the company. See Set up board members and signees.

Set who can approve and sign

Start by telling Cake who has authority. This is the foundation the rest of the workflow sits on.

Go to your company settings and open Board members and signees.
Add each director or authorised signer.
Mark who can sign legal documents on behalf of the company.

Once this is in place, every grant and resolution you send routes to the right people automatically.

Send a grant for board approval

When you create a grant, you can route it straight to the board instead of approving it manually. The board consent Cake generates is the resolution that records the approval, so you don't draft one separately.

Create the option grant as you normally would.
Choose to send it for board approval. Cake generates a board consent document and sends it to your signees for electronic signing.

You can also set board approval as a default on the option pool, so every new grant from that pool routes for board approval automatically instead of being approved one grant at a time. For the full detail on how board approval works in Cake, see Send option grants for board approval.

Add a company signature to grants

Some companies want an authorised signer to sign a grant on behalf of the company before it reaches the employee. That signer can be your CEO, a manager, your CFO, an attorney, or whoever makes sense for your company. Turn on the company signature requirement and Cake routes each grant to that signer first.

In Board members and signees, add the person who signs on behalf of your company as a signee. This can be your CEO, a manager, your CFO, an attorney, or whoever makes sense for your company.
Enable the company signature requirement on the grant or at the plan level.
Cake sends the grant to your company signer. Once they sign, it continues to the employee.

See Require a company signature on option grants.

Track signing progress

Once a document is out for signature, you don't have to chase people by email.

Open Documents > Pending signatures to see which documents are signed and which are still outstanding.
Send a reminder to any signer who hasn't completed their signature yet.

What happens next

Once everyone has signed, the approved grant or resolution is recorded against your Cap Table and stored automatically, so your records stay accurate and audit-ready. Signers receive their signed copy by email, and employees see their approved grant in their My Cake portal.