Every participant who retires has to be bought out in cash. In a mature ESOP that becomes one of the largest and least predictable outflows the company has — and most CFOs are working from a consultant's study that was accurate on the day it was delivered two years ago.
Import a census, add your appraiser's value, and the projection is live. It stays live.
Four consecutive years above the line, starting in 2030. The founder cohort reaches 62 together, and §409(o) requires them paid the year after they go.
Repurchase studies are good work. The problem is not the analysis — it is that the analysis is a photograph, and the thing it photographs will not hold still.
Your appraiser reprices the stock every twelve months and your workforce turns over continuously. A study commissioned every two to four years is wrong for most of the time you own it, and it never tells you by how much.
“What if growth is 3% instead of 7%?” is a phone call and an invoice. It should be a dropdown. The spread between the cases is usually the finding, and it is the thing a static report is worst at showing.
A board asks why 2031 is so large. The honest answer names people and a statute, and a PDF cannot produce it. Here every figure opens: who, when they leave, which section sets the timing, which instalment this is.
Participant by participant, not a company-wide rule of thumb. Every person carries a probability of leaving each year by each cause, and the statutory rules decide when the money actually moves.
§409(o) distribution timing and the instalment extension. §409(h) put option windows. §401(a)(28)(B) diversification, with the cumulative 25%/50% caps modelled correctly — the single most common way a forecast overstates the obligation. §404 flags the deduction ceiling on recycling.
Redemption, recycling and releverage on the same census. Watch redemption quietly shrink the ESOP's stake, recycling compound next decade's obligation, and releverage look cheapest right up until you count the debt service past the horizon.
Click a year and see the people in it, the rule that set each payment date, and which instalment of how many. The drill-down is a filter over the same events the total was summed from, so it cannot disagree with the figure it explains.
New census, new appraisal, new answer — in a minute, not a quarter. Every import is kept as a dated snapshot, so “what changed since the study?” is a question with an answer.
Every change to every assumption, with what it was before and who changed it. When the board asks why last quarter's number moved, the answer is a table rather than an argument.
Board-ready output with the assumptions listed, the defaults you have not calibrated flagged, the data provenance stated, and the statutory basis cited. Print to PDF and send it.
Worth saying plainly. The repurchase obligation gets paid whether or not you own this software. What changes is when you find out.
A CFO who knows in 2026 that 2031 needs $8M negotiates a facility from a position of strength. A CFO who finds out in 2031 borrows reactively, at a worse rate, from a lender who can see why they are calling.
An acquisition or a plant expansion looks different when you know most of the free cash is spoken for within thirty months. The mistake is not the deal; it is not knowing.
A cash squeeze that delays participant distributions is not an inconvenience. It is a fiduciary problem, and it arrives with the people it affects already unhappy.
A planning tool that oversteps is worse than no planning tool, because it is believed. These limits are deliberate and permanent.
IRC §401(a)(28)(C) requires an annual valuation by an independent qualified appraiser. Every figure here is your appraiser's number, moved by a growth rate you chose and can see. Tideline has no opinion about what a share is worth and is built so it cannot form one.
No certification, no statement of actuarial opinion, no signature. It is a scenario and planning tool, and the report says so on its face rather than in a footnote.
§409(p), nondiscrimination testing and the rest are your TPA's work, and doing them badly alongside a forecast would help nobody.
The three funding strategies are laid out with their consequences. Which one is prudent depends on your debt capacity, your outside shareholders and your trustee's judgement — and that decision is theirs, not a spreadsheet's.
Where this projection and your plan document disagree, the plan document governs. ERISA counsel, the trustee and the TPA are not optional, and nothing here pretends otherwise.
The shipped turnover and retirement tables are a starting point. A standard table applied to a specific workforce gives a specific wrong answer, and the product nags about it until you calibrate against your own history.
About what one repurchase study costs — except it arrives every year instead of every three, and it is current the morning your board asks. Priced per plan, not per seat: give the trustee and the lender a login, because the second reader is what makes the first one trust the number.
$1,250 a month, billed annually
$2,150 a month, billed annually
21 days free, no card, and the trial holds a real census of up to 400 participants — evaluating this on sample data would tell you nothing. A repurchase obligation study runs $15,000–$40,000 and arrives every two to four years.