INSIGHT

Pulley Is Shutting Down: What to Do with Your Cap Table Before December 8

September 17, 2026

Services: Technical Accounting

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If your company manages its capitalization table in Pulley, you have a decision to make and a calendar working against you.

On September 15, 2026, the equity management platform announced it is winding down. The final day of operations and services is December 8, 2026, after which the application becomes inaccessible. Pulley has arranged an assisted migration path to Carta, but is that the right path for your company?

It’s a tight window for a decision most finance teams did not plan to make this quarter. Here is how to think about it.

The Dates That Matter

Three deadlines shape everything that follows:

November 30, 2026. The cutoff to opt into the arranged Carta migration and the associated pricing terms.

December 8, 2026. Pulley ceases operations. The platform goes dark and support ends.

January 31, 2027. Limited data access from Pulley is expected to end entirely.

The November date is the one companies are most likely to miss, because it does not feel urgent in September. It is also the only one you can still act on with the benefit of vendor assistance.

The Default Path Deserves a Real Look

Moving to Carta is the path of least resistance, and for many companies without near-term IPO aspirations, it will be the right call. However, it’s worth understanding what it involves. Pricing is matched for the first year; however, a new contract with Carta will need to be signed. Companies currently on a monthly billing plan will need to move to quarterly or annual terms, since monthly billing is not offered by Carta.

There is one more detail worth knowing before you decide: Pulley has said it will not assist migrations to any provider other than Carta. If you choose a different platform, you are exporting and reconstructing your own records, on your own timeline, with the December 8 lights-out date as a hard stop.

That does not mean the default is wrong. It means the decision should be made deliberately. The useful question is not whether the new platform can replicate what you had. It is whether it fits where your equity program requirements could head over the next two to five years.

Data Integrity Is the Real Exposure

The migration itself is an inconvenience. The data underneath it is the risk.

Different platforms may have new fields or additional data you can add that wasn’t present in Pulley. This presents an opportunity to uplift the quality of data in your equity platform, and an opportunity to get ahead of messy equity issues.

“Most companies find out their cap table has problems in the middle of a diligence process or an audit, when the cost of fixing them is highest,” said Will Tanem, Partner, Technical Accounting and IPO Readiness at BPM. “A forced migration is an unwelcome deadline, but it is also a rare opportunity to reconcile everything against source documents while there is still time to correct what you find.”

One thing that can be done as part of the migration is a cap table reconciliation. This process tests every record against source documents: share classes and holders, option grants including unvested and partially vested awards, vesting schedules with cliff dates and acceleration provisions, SAFEs and convertible notes, outstanding warrants, and historical 409A records. In practice, it frequently surfaces discrepancies that predate the migration entirely; errors that were sitting quietly in the system and would have surfaced later at a far worse moment.

Treat the migration as a verification exercise rather than a copy-and-paste task, and the disruption starts to pay for itself.

IPO Ambitions Impact the Decision

For companies eyeing an IPO or SPAC in the coming years, platform selection carries more weight than it does for an early-stage startup tracking a single option pool.

Public-company equity programs generate obligations that private ones do not: Section 16 filings, proxy disclosures, insider trading reports, participant recordkeeping at scale, brokerage connectivity, and more. A platform that handled a Series A comfortably may not support a company managing restricted stock releases, performance awards, an employee stock purchase plan, and a lockup period simultaneously.

If your equity program has grown more complex than the system managing it, this transition is a reasonable moment to evaluate a more robust platform rather than simply finding the nearest replacement.

A Chance to Mature Accounting Operations

There is a second opportunity buried in this timeline.

Stock-based compensation expense reporting under ASC 718 is work that plenty of growing companies postpone until an audit or an investor forces the issue. The consequences of leaving it undone tend to accumulate quietly and then arrive together: restated financial statements, audit adjustments tied to share-based compensation expense, missed tax withholding on option exercises or vesting events, and cap table discrepancies that slow or reprice a transaction.

You are already going to be validating grant-level data, vesting schedules, and historical valuations as part of this migration. Standing up proper expense reporting while that data is in front of you is dramatically more efficient and cost-effective than doing it as a standalone project 18 months from now.

A Clean Cap Table Is Worth More Than the Migration

Ownership records are among the first things investors, acquirers, lenders, and auditors examine. Inconsistent or incomplete equity documentation delays transactions, invites lower valuations, and drives legal costs upward as counsel untangles what should have been straightforward.

The companies that come through this transition well will be the ones that used it to produce a cleaner, better-documented cap table than the one they started with. The companies that struggle will be the ones that exported a file, imported it somewhere else, and assumed the numbers came across correctly.

Start Before the Window Closes

If you are a Pulley customer, four steps are worth taking in the next few weeks:

• Export a complete copy of your equity data now, independent of any migration decision, and store it where your finance and legal colleagues can reach it.
• Decide whether the arranged Carta path or an alternative platform better matches your growth plans and make that call with enough runway to act before November 30.
• Reconcile your records against source documents, including board consents, grant agreements, and 409A reports, rather than trusting a system-to-system transfer.
• Use the reconciliation to close any gaps in stock-based compensation reporting while the underlying data is already open.

BPM’s Equity & Technical Accounting practices include Certified Equity Professionals and ASC 718 specialists who can work alongside your finance, legal, and human resources teams on cap table reconciliation, platform selection and implementation, expense reporting, and IPO readiness. If you are facing this deadline and would rather not face it alone, we can help you move quickly and get it right the first time.