Certent Equity Compensation Management, now part of Insightsoftware since the January 21 acquisition, helps companies stay compliant in the administration of equity awards and grants.
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Carta
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Carta is an equity management platform that helps private companies manage their cap tables and issue securities electronically. Carta's tools help companies with valuations, tax filings, and equity compliance. Most recently, Carta launched Total Comp—a compensation management suite that offers benchmarking, leveling, scorecards, total rewards statements, and other tools used to forecast, hire, and retain…
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.
Carta is perfect for any sized organization when shares and stock options are in the picture for new/seasoned employees alike. If a company does not provide these benefits to employees, it may not be the best fit for them unless there are other value-adds the tool can provide in other areas.
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.
Still some issues with the auto-generated Excel file for stock calculations that required correction by technical support.
Could offer integration into accounting platforms or HR/payroll platforms to further cut down on manual input.
It should allow for custom user creation to allow for varying levels of access based on role in the company; currently, all security roles in the platform are out of the box without any modification allowed.
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.
Every time I have sent a message to Carta's support team, they've responded within 2 business days. The support team is very helpful and always has answered my questions competently and professionally. Many of my questions have also been answered through their extensive support articles. Carta makes available a lot of information that has helped reduce te administrative work of answering questions for our employees as they are able to get most of the information they need through Carta's website.
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.
I was not personally involved in choosing Carta over any other platforms. However, I can say I'm very happy with Carta. Carta allows for a central place to manage stock options from multiple companies and is extremely user-friendly and intuitive. With Carta being a market leader, it's nice to find new employers already using it as well.
If a company's cap table is wrong that is legally considered fraud ( yes, a capital F fraud ), as in there could be criminal repercussions, and almost assuredly whatever transaction that requires it to be accurate will be canceled.
Compliance is a major factor when it comes to having a stock option plan. Carta is the best I've seen at keeping a company in compliance.