Certent Equity Management vs. Optimum Solutions HRIS (discontinued)

Certent Equity Management is well suited in the following ways: 1. [The] software provides seamless integration to internal software. 2. [It provides] detailed reports of market equity management. 3. [The] software prepares financial equity footnotes for 10k reporting very well. 4. It helps with award modification [as] needed. 5. I enjoy doing capitalization tables.

Optimum Solutions works very well for all our payroll needs. We run payrolls weekly, semi-monthly, monthly and yearly. The end of year process is lined out very well and webinars are available to go over any new regulations required. We haven't utilized the HR part of the software as much on the iSeries but are planning on changing that once we get converted to the Windows version later this year. The main reason for this is the HR part of the software on the iSeries is separate from payroll.

Incentivized

• Expense calculations – the whole accounting for equity awards is pretty technical and not real easy to follow. It does a good job of calculating GAAP expense for each award.

• The setup of Optimum HRIS was intense as the software comes as a basic shell and everything is personalized to our organization. All earnings codes, leave time, employee types, job codes, taxes, etc. are set up for each company. While this was almost overwhelming at the beginning, we have so much control over the set up and better grasp of the inner workings of the system.
• Tax updates come quickly and are easily applied. This is especially welcome at year end.
• The built-in reporting is robust and offers a lot of options, but the ability to dig in to the database using SQL and Excel allows for very powerful reports that are infinitely personalized.

• There are no features that are hard to use or that I would like to see improved.

Incentivized

• When exporting reports to Excel I found the formatting to be difficult to work with and having to reformat the reports can be a nightmare. My company's IT department created its own business tools to make the reporting format more user friendly.

Incentivized

I personally like the Equity Edge software better. The reporting is better and the software easier to use. The reason we didn’t continue to work with them is we didn’t want to use E-Trade as captive broker.

Pretty easy to go through and learn on your own.

I can only remember a couple of times when cannot access the system.

We do not access support directly. We go through Plan Mosaic.

We had a 2 hour introduction to the software over a Webex meeting by Plan Mosaic, and a user guide. Plan Mosaic is a reseller.

A lot of decisions had been made already when I joined. I thought it was a fairly smooth process. You just need to make sure that you do a good job of auditing all the awards that are transferred from system to system. We did a reverse stock split that caused challenges with rounding of shares.

As an organization, we have evaluated various Equity management and accounting software before shortlisting and testing these software and finally selecting 1 software. It has a user-friendly interface that helps and encourages employee participation. Moreover, it has simple and easy-to-understand grants and reporting, which are illustrated by easy-to-understand examples.

We evaluated some payroll services but found the ongoing cost greater than the initial cost of purchasing our own software and keeping the payroll process in house. Other payroll software was generally more expensive and we are satisfied with Optimum Solutions. I would say the main reason we stayed with Optimum Solutions, converting from their iSeries version to their Windows version, was because of their outstanding staff and support.

Incentivized

• It helps with taxation compliance, which could be a major issue.
• [The] uploaded template helps with large amounts of data [that needs] uploading in grants and helps keep a lean team in management and operations.
• [The] availability of different types of reports makes transactional activity easy.
• Accounting, reporting, and disclosures become easy.

• More accurate payroll processing
• More accurate tax payments and reporting