Suneet Singal on report dates and effective dates

Suneet Singal’s career page keeps more than one date beside a single chief executive officer departure, because those dates do not describe the same moment. A company report can carry a date that identifies the document, a date in the sentence that says what was agreed, and a date for when the change takes effect. Mixing them produces a timeline that looks precise and is not. The report date names the report. The event or agreement date names when the narrative says the resignation, agreement, or appointment happened. The effective date names when the text says the change takes effect. This entry shows how to label each one before it is repeated, using the historical filings already linked from this site and no dates beyond those the reading is built on.

Why a month is not a date

Readers compress. “December 2017” is easier to remember than three labeled days, and a biography that is already long will be tempted to keep the month and drop the labels. The compression feels harmless until someone asks a factual question. Did the office end on the day of the agreement, on the day of the report, or on the day the report says the departure takes effect? A month cannot answer. A month can only tell you where to look. If the sentence you are about to publish is going to be repeated by someone else, the month is not enough. The labeled day is the thing worth repeating.

The same compression happens with “September 2017.” That phrase can honestly describe when a report was filed, in the sense this site uses it for the First Capital Investment Corporation Form 8-K. It cannot replace the effective date of 12 September 2017 if the question is when the acting appointment took effect. A careful page may use the month for the report and the full date for the effectiveness, and it should not make the reader guess which is which. The words “report,” “agreement,” and “effective” are not synonyms. They are labels, and the label is part of the fact.

Suneet Singal’s site states a background in real estate and corporate finance and then points to records. The records are useful only if a later sentence can be checked against them. A check fails when the sentence says “left in December” and the reader cannot tell whether that means the agreement, the report, or the effective departure in early January. The remedy is not a longer adjective. The remedy is a date with a job. Give every date a job before you put it next to a title.

The date of the report

The date of the report identifies the document. On a Form 8-K, the cover has a line for that date. When you cite the filing, this is the date that belongs in the citation if you are naming the report rather than the event. This site describes the FC Global Realty Incorporated filing as a Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017. That is the report date used in the career timeline and in this reference. Use it when you mean the document. Do not use it when you mean the day the chief executive officer departure took effect.

A report date can fall on a different day from the event the report describes. That is ordinary. News takes time to be written down, exhibits take time to be attached, and the form has its own instructions about timing. Investor.gov notes that companies generally have four business days to file a Form 8-K for an event that triggers the requirement. The existence of a filing window is a reason to expect the report date and the event date to diverge sometimes. It is not a reason to treat them as interchangeable, and it is not a statistic about any officer. It is a feature of the form. Read the date that is printed, and assign it to the document.

When you take notes, write “report date” on the same line as the day, not in a legend three lines above. Future you will otherwise grab the most prominent date and use it for everything. The most prominent date is often the one in the cover heading, which is exactly the one that should not be silently reused as the effective date. Prominence is not meaning. The label is the meaning.

The date of the agreement or the event

Inside the narrative, a report often says that something happened on a stated day. For the FC Global Realty Incorporated Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017, the event this reference uses is the resignation and separation agreement on 22 December 2017. That date answers a different question from the report date. It answers when the company describes the resignation and the separation agreement as having occurred. If your sentence is about the agreement, 22 December 2017 is the date that belongs in the sentence. If your sentence is about the document, 28 December 2017 belongs there instead.

Do not upgrade an agreement date into an ending date without the text. An agreement can set an effective date in the future. People sign on one day and the office changes on another. The signature, or the date the narrative gives for the agreement, is evidence of the agreement. The effective date is evidence of when the change takes effect. Both can be true. Neither replaces the other. A timeline that has only one column called “date” will force a choice and hide the other fact. Give the timeline two columns, or write the label in the cell.

The September 2017 First Capital Investment Corporation report is a different document about a different company. The fact this reference takes from it is an acting chief executive officer appointment effective 12 September 2017. If you are writing about that appointment, do not import 22 December or 2 January from the other issuer. Dates travel badly between documents. A date is true of the sentence it was attached to, in the filing it came from. Paste the link beside the date so the attachment stays visible.

The effective date

The effective date is the date the text says the change takes effect. For the FC Global Realty Incorporated departure, that date is 2 January 2018. A sentence that wants to say when the chief executive officer role ended, as reported, uses 2 January 2018. It can mention the earlier agreement in a separate clause. It should not substitute the agreement date and then describe the substitution as a simplification. Simplification that changes the day is not simplification. It is a different claim.

For the First Capital Investment Corporation appointment, the effective date this reference uses is 12 September 2017, and the role is acting chief executive officer. The effective date does not by itself say how long the appointment lasted, and it does not say that the role continues. An effective date tells you when the reported change takes effect. Duration, if you need it, has to come from a later document that says so. This reference does not supply a later document, so it does not supply a duration. The honest sentence stops at the effective date and stays in the past tense.

Effective dates are also easy to confuse with announcement dates in ordinary speech. People say “he became chief executive in September” when they mean either the day the board acted or the day a website updated a biography. Those can differ. When the source is a filing, prefer the filing’s verb. “Effective 12 September 2017” is a verb-like phrase you can keep intact. “Became” is a paraphrase. If you paraphrase, keep the word acting and keep the day. The paraphrase is not an improvement if it is less checkable than the original.

A worked reading of the December 2017 report

Put the three dates in one place and give each a label before you write prose. Report date: 28 December 2017, the date this site uses for the FC Global Realty Incorporated Form 8-K. Agreement date: 22 December 2017, the day the resignation and separation agreement are described. Effective date: 2 January 2018, the day the chief executive officer departure takes effect. Read them down the page. None of the three is a guess. None of them is a financial result. None of them is a reason. They are the timing facts the reading is allowed to use.

Now write the sentence from the labels rather than from memory. “In its Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017, FC Global Realty Incorporated described a resignation and separation agreement on 22 December 2017, with the chief executive officer departure effective 2 January 2018.” That sentence can sit on the career page and in a source note. It does not say the person left on 22 December. It does not say the report was signed on 2 January. It does not name a payment, a successor, or a motive, because those are not the facts this sentence undertook to carry.

If a draft of the same sentence drops one date “for space,” decide which question the sentence is answering and delete the dates that belong to other questions, but do not leave a bare month. A short form that remains accurate is: “FC Global Realty Incorporated reported a chief executive officer departure effective 2 January 2018, in a Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017.” The agreement date can live in the next sentence if you need it. Space is not a reason to let 22 December and 2 January become the same day.

A worked reading of the September 2017 appointment

The second filing needs fewer dates and more care about the title. Report, as this site describes it: a September 2017 Form 8-K of First Capital Investment Corporation. Effective date: 12 September 2017. Role: acting chief executive officer. Company: the full legal name, not a shortened “First Capital” that could point at a different entity. Person: Suneet Singal. Tense: past, because the record is historical and is not presented here as a current job. Those fields are the whole example. Adding a field because the other filing had one is how dates leak across companies.

A sentence that respects the fields is: “A September 2017 Form 8-K of First Capital Investment Corporation reported Suneet Singal’s appointment as acting chief executive officer, effective 12 September 2017.” You can put the EDGAR link on the sentence. You should not add “and left on 2 January 2018,” because that January date belongs to a different issuer’s report. You should not drop “acting” because the effective date looks more official without it. Official, in this setting, means faithful to the words and the day the filing gives you.

Notice the asymmetry between the two examples. One report is cited with a full report date of 28 December 2017 because that is the date this reference uses for it. The other is cited as a September 2017 report, with the precision placed on the effective date of 12 September 2017. Do not “correct” that asymmetry by inventing a day for the September report date that this guide has not established. If you open the filing and your own note needs a more precise report date, label it as the date you read on the cover and keep it separate from the effective date. Do not backfill this page’s examples with dates it did not set out to use.

How to store dates so a later edit cannot merge them

A workable note has separate fields even if the published sentence weaves them into prose. One field for the organization. One for the document and its URL. One for the report date. One for the agreement or event date. One for the effective date. One for the role, copied rather than improved. One for the limit: what this document does not establish. The company-record guide is a worksheet of those fields. Use it when you are about to move a date from a filing into a biography, a timeline, or a caption under a photograph.

Before you publish, read the sentence aloud and tap the table every time you hear a day. If you hear a day that is not in the table, the sentence has grown a fact. If you hear a title without a day, the sentence has lost a fact. If you hear two companies in one breath, split the breath. The test is mechanical, which is why it works when you are tired or when the person in the sentence is someone you would rather describe more warmly or more harshly. Warmth and harshness are not dates.

Keep the labels in the public sentence when there is any chance a reader will reuse it. “Effective 2 January 2018” is longer than “2018,” and it is shorter than the correction you will have to write later. The same is true of “report dated 28 December 2017” and “agreement on 22 December 2017.” This is a reading guide. It does not tell you what to conclude about a company or a person beyond the timing the document states. It tells you how to keep the clocks from being rewritten into one clock.

What this entry does not claim

Suneet Singal’s published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. Company filings linked from this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Grant and Giving websites describe him as the founder of those programs. This entry explains a general subject. It is not a private track record, a current job title, an investment result, or a quote.

Continue with how to read a Form 8-K and why a title needs a date. The labeled dates are applied on the career page. This is a reading guide, not legal or financial advice.