What is a subscription process

The five stages of a subscription process and how one workflow holds them together — plus the two things about it that surprise people.

Overview

Completing a subscription means several things happening at once for many people: transactions to record, documents to generate, signatures to collect, payments to reconcile. Run that across email, spreadsheets and shared folders and the basic questions become hard — who has paid, who still needs to sign, what is blocking us.

A subscription process is one workflow that holds all of it, for one subscription round, with its own dashboard.

This is the gateway lesson for the course. Twelve lessons follow, each covering one stage.

What you'll learn

The five stages every process has
Why they are not a rigid sequence
What launching a process does, and what it does not
How a process ends

The five stages

Once a process exists, its dashboard shows the stages across the top:

Stage	What happens
Transactions Setup	Each transaction is configured and marked ready
Payments	Payment requests are launched, received and verified
Prepare Documents	Legal documents are generated from templates and reviewed
E-Signature Setup	Signers are defined and documents grouped into envelopes
E-Signature	Envelopes are sent and signatures tracked to completion

The dashboard exists to manage and track the subscription process in real time — it becomes the deal team's single view of the round from start to finish.

Two things that surprise people

The stages are not a rigid sequence, but payment does gate signature. Documents can be prepared at any point; the signature waits for payment to be confirmed, unless the payment is marked deferred. That is A8.11.

Nothing reaches a participant unless you send it. Creating a process contacts nobody, and neither does launching it. Every message to a participant — the invitation to create an account included — is dispatched by your team, deliberately, when your team decides. That is A1.6, and it holds throughout the platform.

What launching actually does

Launching gives you the workspace, not the outreach. After it you can:

prepare every transaction the round requires
prepare the legal documentation templates used for e-signature, in parallel
track status for the whole round in real time on the dashboard

What launching does not do is contact anybody. Invitations, payment requests and signature requests are all sent by hand from the relevant stage, at the moment you choose — see A8.13 for payments and A8.10 for envelopes.

The launch summary says as much: "You decide when anything goes out to shareholders — invitations, payment and signature requests are all sent by you." Sending is manual by design, so that the back office keeps control of when a participant is first contacted.

How a process ends

When every transaction is complete, Finish Process closes it. Finishing writes a company event containing the completed transactions and their legal documents, records the transactions against the relevant companies, and updates the cap tables. That is A8.14.

A process can also be cancelled, which deletes it along with its transactions and generated documents. That is irreversible, and the product says so plainly before it happens.

A8.2 — Setting up a subscription · creating one
A8.11 — Subscription process: choosing your payment and signature order · why the stages are not a sequence
A8.14 — Subscription process: finishing and verifying · what the close writes
A6.1 — Events and decisions: the model · where a closed process lands