The timeline

Reading a company's events in order to understand how its cap table reached today — and the view to reach for when a holding has changed.

Overview

The cap table answers what is true now. The timeline answers how it got that way.

It lists a company's events and processes in order. Each event groups the decisions and transactions that belong to it, and — for events created by closing a subscription — the documents that evidence them.

So when someone asks why the sponsor's holding changed between two dates, the timeline is where you look.

Two things called Timeline

The company has a Timeline page, which this lesson is about. The ownership page also has a Timeline view (A5.8). They are not the same thing, and it is worth being clear which you want.

	Shows	Where
Timeline page	The company's events and processes, in order, with their documents	Company nav
Timeline view	The cap table itself, as it stood at each event	Company Ownership

The rule of thumb: come here to ask what happened; go to the ownership page's Timeline view to ask what the numbers were when it happened.

What you'll learn

What the timeline lists, and the two kinds of entry
What you see inside an event
Which questions to bring here rather than to the cap table

Two kinds of entry

Events — a dated grouping. The company's incorporation, an initial closing, each successive wave. A closed subscription process creates one automatically, named with the event name set at the start of the wizard.

Processes — the running or completed workflows themselves.

The timeline shows both, which is what makes it a full account of the company's activity rather than only its finished history.

Reading an event

Open an event and you see what it contained: the transactions, the security types involved, and the documents attached.

That is the auditability chain seen from the history end rather than from the registry end — same underlying facts, different entry point.

History that predates the platform

A company's history usually starts before the platform does. Record Past Event exists for that: entering the incorporation, the initial closing and any intervening movements so the cap table reconstructs correctly.

A typical structure carries a constitution and an initial closing on its timeline, both recorded rather than transacted on the platform.

What to use it for

Explaining a change. Two cap-table readings differ; the timeline says which event sits between them.
Finding the paperwork. An event carries the documents produced for it.
Checking a close landed. After finishing a subscription, the new event appearing here is the confirmation.
Orienting on an unfamiliar company. Read top to bottom, it is the fastest way to understand what has happened.

Common problems

The timeline is empty on a company you know has history. That history has not been recorded. Use Record Past Event.

An expected event is missing after closing a process. Finishing a process is asynchronous, and it analyses documents before writing. Give it time, then check again.

Events are there but the cap table looks wrong. Read the events. The cap table is derived from them, so a wrong figure means a wrong movement inside one of them.

A5.1 — Reading the cap table · the position the timeline explains
A5.7 — The registry: tracing a transaction to its signed document · the same chain, entered from the other end
A6.1 — Events and decisions: the model · how events are structured
A8.14 — Subscription process: finishing and verifying · what writes an event automatically