What's the easiest way to migrate an existing cap table to a new platform?

The easiest way to migrate an existing cap table is to follow a structured six-step process: export your current data, clean it, import it into the new platform, reconcile the totals, verify every record, and lock the history.

When you treat it as a controlled data exercise with clear checkpoints, migration is far less risky than most founders expect.

The fear around migration is understandable — your cap table holds the most sensitive ownership data your company has. But most of the risk founders imagine comes from doing it manually. With a structured process and a concierge service handling the data work, the common snags (vesting schedules, SAFEs, pro-rata rights) get caught at reconciliation before anything goes live.

Why migration is easier than founders expect

The fear around cap table migration usually comes from founders who tried to do it manually by copy-pasting between spreadsheets, or from hearing a horror story from someone who did.

Modern cap table platforms have built structured import tooling because migration is a common event. Most companies switch at a meaningful inflection: a Series A, a new CFO, a 409A provider change, or the realization that a spreadsheet is slowing down routine equity tasks.

What makes migration manageable is that your ownership data is structured: share classes, certificate numbers, issue dates, vesting schedules, strike prices, grant agreements. That structure means errors are findable. A reconciliation step will surface them before they cause problems.

What you need to do vs. what the new platform handles

Most platforms offer a migration service, although they can vary in what's included. Understanding the division of labor upfront removes most of the anxiety.

What the platform typically handles: exporting your data in the right format, importing it into the new system, and reconciling the numbers so totals match your existing records.

What you need to do: review the reconciled output before going live and confirm everything looks right. You know your equity history better than anyone. The platform surfaces the data cleanly, your job is to spot anything that doesn't match your records.

Most founders who've been through it say the actual effort on their end was lighter than expected.

The migration process

Step 1: Export

Pull a complete data export from your current platform or spreadsheet. Most platforms offer a CSV or Excel export. If you are on a legacy system, a PDF ledger will take a little more time to clean but can work.

What you need in the export: all security types (common, preferred, options, warrants, SAFEs, convertible notes), cap table ledger with certificate numbers, grant agreements, vesting schedules with start dates and cliff terms, and any investor-specific side letters or pro-rata rights. If you're working with a migration team, they'll give you a checklist — you don't have to figure out what's missing on your own.

Step 2: Clean

Before anything gets imported, the export needs to be cleaned. Duplicate rows, missing certificate numbers, vesting schedules that don't roll up to the correct pool total, terminated employees who still show active grants — these are the most common issues, and they're easy to miss if you haven't done this before.

For most cap tables this step is lighter than founders expect, but complex tables with multiple financing rounds take more time. A migration expert who has seen hundreds of these knows exactly where to look. What takes a first-timer a day can take them an hour.

Step 3: Import

Your cleaned data gets uploaded to the new platform using a structured import template with field-level validation that flags errors during upload. The template matters — reformatting your export to match it usually introduces new errors, so fill it column by column from scratch.

Step 4: Reconcile

A reconciliation check compares totals: shares authorized, shares issued, fully diluted share count, and option pool available versus granted. These get checked against your last board-approved cap table and most recent 409A report. They should match exactly.

If they don't, the discrepancy is almost always in one of three places: a round with a pro-rata exercise that was partially applied, an option grant not fully reflected in the authorized pool increase, or a SAFE that hasn't converted but is included in some fully diluted calculations and excluded from others. These are subtle. An experienced migration team catches them before they become your problem.

Step 5: Verify

Reconciliation checks totals. Verification checks individual records. A sample of ten to fifteen stakeholder records gets pulled at random — vesting start date, cliff, grant size checked against the original grant agreement. For SAFEs, valuation cap, discount rate, and pro-rata right confirmed.

This is the one step that genuinely needs your eyes on it. You know your equity history better than anyone — and having a second person, ideally a co-founder, CFO, or outside counsel, do an independent check on the highest-value records is worth the extra hour.

Step 6: Lock

Once the new platform is confirmed, the old one gets set to read-only. This is non-negotiable. Running two editable cap tables simultaneously is how split-of-record errors happen: an option exercise gets recorded in the old system, the new platform misses it, and the next 409A is based on stale data.

What concierge migration looks like with Cake, and how long it takes

At Cake, what we see most often is founders who come to us before a financing round, ready to be fully operational before the next equity event. Our concierge migration team gets your cap table live in 2–5 business days.

Our team handles the data work from export through import and reconciliation. Cake matches everything against your exported spreadsheet data so the numbers are clean before you review.

Before anything goes live, you confirm the reconciled output looks right: a focused review, not a line-by-line rebuild from scratch. Our team knows where the common snags are and flags them during reconciliation. Note: document uploads (grant agreements, 409A reports) are added to your Documents section separately after migration.

The founders who run into problems are almost always the ones who import and go live without the verify step, and discover six months later that a single SAFE was not captured correctly."