Certent Equity Management vs. Shareworks, by Morgan Stanley

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.

Well suited for privately or publicly held companies with stock option plans or ESPP. Helpful for calculating stock compensation expense.

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.

• Calendar of vesting schedule
• Visibility into value of various equity based compensation
• Ability to setup default release elections at vesting dates

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• At the time, couldn't calculate a formula based on milestone vesting
• Had some small hiccups with calculating stock option compensation expense, but Capshare was able to solve over time.

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 great team consisting of two Solium Shareworks admin experts, and one financial reporting expert to help us with the implementation. After the implementation, I feel we are in good hands with the Solium Shareworks relationship manager. We have quarterly contact with the team when new grants need to be added. Other then that, we are self-sufficient with the tool.

Incentivized

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 like Carta because they offer transfer agent services in addition to Cap Table management. Shareworks is the upgraded Capshare. This is for IPO ready companies who are ready to take the next steps

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.

• Positive - easy for employees to review stock plan and agreement.
• Positive - easy to pull cap table reports.
• Negative - requires a lot of administrative work for account activation, acceptance by users.
• Negative - support is not responsive.

Incentivized