Stock plan administration teams spend significant time preparing equity data files for broker ingestion. Grant files, participant records, vesting schedules, and exercise histories all need to be accurate, complete, and properly formatted before they leave your desk.
The problem is not that teams are careless. It is that spreadsheets do not push back. A missing grant date, a duplicate record, or a column name that does not match the broker's expected format — these issues hide in plain sight until a downstream system rejects the file or, worse, processes it incorrectly.
The cost of catching errors late
When a broker or transfer agent rejects a file, the cost is not just the time to fix it. There is the resubmission cycle, the coordination overhead, and the risk that the correction introduces new issues. For teams handling quarterly or annual submission cycles, each rejection compounds the pressure.
What validation at the source looks like
Validation at the source means checking the file before it leaves your environment. This includes:
- Verifying that required fields like employee ID, grant date, and grant type are present and populated
- Detecting duplicate records within the file
- Flagging vesting events that conflict with termination dates
- Checking that granted shares do not exceed the available pool under the plan
- Mapping source columns to canonical field names so downstream systems receive consistent data
This is the problem PlanSight is designed to solve. Upload the file you already have, validate it against practical rules, surface the issues ranked by severity, and move forward with a cleaner handoff.
Start with the file in front of you
You do not need a platform purchase or a six-month implementation project to get value from validation. Start with one file, one submission cycle, and see what surfaces.