Pulley vs. Carta for Franchisees With One Entity Per Unit

List every legal entity in the portfolio, one row per unit, with the entity name, its owners, and the percentage each owner holds. Include units where the operator holds one hundred percent and there is no outside investor, since those still need to appear in the full picture.

This step alone often surfaces entities that have been effectively forgotten, a unit sold to a manager years ago that nobody has revisited, or an investor whose original agreement predates the company's current recordkeeping.

Expect this inventory to take longer than it sounds like it should. Operators who have been opening units for close to a decade routinely find that nobody currently on staff can explain the ownership history of the earliest locations, which means the answer has to come from old filings and whoever the original investors were, not from institutional memory.

For every unit, confirm there is a signed operating agreement or stock ledger behind the ownership percentages on your list, not just a verbal understanding of who invested what. Franchise units financed quickly, often to hit an opening deadline, are the most likely places to find a handshake standing in for a document.

Where the documentation is missing, get it created now, using whatever records exist, bank transfers, emails, early conversations, to reconstruct what was actually agreed, before memories fade further.

Treat any gap you find as urgent even if the unit in question is performing well and nobody involved seems inclined to dispute anything today. The absence of a document only becomes a real problem once someone wants to sell, and by then the people who could confirm the original terms may no longer be reachable.

For an operator with a small number of units, each with a simple ownership split, Pulley can represent each entity cleanly without much overhead, though you will still be managing them somewhat separately.

Once the portfolio reaches a size where one investor holds different percentages in several units, or where lenders and franchisors want a consolidated ownership view, Carta's multi-entity reporting starts to justify its additional complexity.

There is no fixed unit count where the switch becomes obviously worth it. It depends more on how often investors overlap across units and how frequently a consolidated view actually gets requested than on the raw number of entities in the portfolio.

Once every entity is documented and entered into a platform, build a single summary showing total ownership by person across the entire portfolio, not just within each unit. This is the view a lender, a franchisor conducting a transfer review, or a potential buyer of the whole operation will actually ask for.

Without this step, having each individual entity's cap table in good shape still leaves you unable to answer a simple question: across everything you operate, who owns what.

An investor who put money into three units at different points may hold three different percentages, and the rolled-up view should show all three next to each other, not as separate facts scattered across separate files. That single view is usually the first thing a franchisor's transfer department asks for when reviewing a change at any one unit.

Once the backlog is cleaned up, adopt a standard template for how future units bring in investors, consistent terms for vesting or buyout rights, a consistent entity structure, and a consistent point at which the new entity gets added to whichever platform you use.

This does not mean every unit needs identical ownership percentages. It means the process for documenting and recording ownership stops being reinvented every time a new location opens, which is where most of the original mess came from in the first place.

A standard template for each new unit should settle the following:

• The entity structure every future unit will use, so each new location is formed the same way.
• Consistent terms for vesting or buyout rights when a local investor joins a unit.
• A signed operating agreement or stock ledger before any outside capital comes in, so no unit relies on a handshake.
• A fixed point at which each new entity is added to whichever platform the operator uses, so the rolled-up view stays current.