EquityNav

EquityNav is the equity and tax planning engine for RIAs and CPAs, giving advisors citation-backed, tax-optimized answers in minutes, in place of hand-built spreadsheets that take days and still miss AMT traps.

The situation

Equity compensation is one of the most valuable and most confusing parts of a client's wealth. A single person can hold ISOs, NSOs, RSUs, and ESPP shares at the same time, and each one is taxed differently. The decisions around them, when to exercise, how much, and in which tax year, carry outsized consequences. A wrong move can trigger the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax that can hit hard when incentive stock options are exercised, or leave a six-figure tax bill on the table.

Today advisors work these problems in hand-built spreadsheets that take days to assemble and still miss traps. For a profession paid to get the numbers right, equity comp is the widest gap between what clients need and what advisors can deliver quickly.

Why it was hard

The tempting version is a fancy tax calculator. That is not the hard part. The difficulty is threefold. First, the math has to be exactly right across grant types that interact: exercising ISOs can trigger AMT, an ESPP sale can be a qualifying or disqualifying disposition, RSUs vest as ordinary income, and the best move in one bucket changes the tax owed in another. Second, advisors are fiduciaries, so an answer with no defensible basis is worse than useless, it is a liability. The engine has to cite the rule it relied on, not just produce a number. Third, real advice compounds, so the system has to remember a client's full equity position and the prior conversation, or every session starts from zero. Getting all three right, with no tolerance for a wrong figure, is the real problem.

The approach

EquityNav lets an advisor ask a complex equity question in plain language and get an answer they can stand behind. The system holds each client's full equity position, every grant, type, and key date, along with the running conversation, so advice compounds across sessions instead of restarting each time.

When a question comes in, EquityNav runs the multi-scenario tax calculations across every grant type atonce, modeling how a move in one bucket changes the tax in another, and surfaces the tax-optimized path. Every answer comes back citation-backed, tied to the specific rule it relied on rather than an unsupported number. What used to take days of hand-built modeling returns in minutes.

What happened

The change for an advisor is stark. A multi-grant scenario that once meant days of spreadsheet work, and still risked missing an AMT trap, now comes back in minutes as a tax-optimized answer with the rule behind it cited. Because the engine models every grant type together, it catches the interactions a single-bucket spreadsheet misses. Because it remembers each client's position and history, the advice compounds from one meeting to the next instead of being rebuilt every time. EquityNav is being built and validated with design partners in the RIA and CPA world, against a simple bar: the numbers have to be right every time.

What this means for you

If you advise clients on equity compensation, you already know the exposure. The work is slow, the traps are expensive, and a single wrong exercise decision can cost a client six figures. The bottleneck was never your expertise. It was the hand-built modeling standing between a client's question and a defensible answer. That is what EquityNav removes, and it is the shape of what becomes possible when deep equity-comp expertise and agent infrastructure are built together.