Certent Equity Management vs. E*TRADE

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.

It is well suited for investment in common stocks, bonds, and other commercial paper. It is well suited for purchasing foreign stocks. It is not presently appropriate for other investment opportunities involving private stocks or limited issues. Extracting funds can be a challenge from time to time. Collecting data on investment opportunities is not always easy to do.

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.

• Gives you graphic on how a stock is doing.
• Gives you some insight to the company background.
• Lets you track how your investments are doing.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• summary page needs to have more details like it doesn't show current market price for an option purchased
• purchase or sell needs to be user friendly so it takes less 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 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.

E*TRADE allows ease of use and reasonable fees. We selected E*TRADE because they offer the set of applications we were seeking. We do not have to pay for expensive service access that we do not use. E*TRADE is compatible with our systems and their reporting has been simple to integrate into our systems.

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.

• Limit how much you want invest.
• This is an open trade website and there is a risk of losing your money based on your investments.
• If you make some sound investments and keep yourself within a budgeted spending limit there is the opportunity to make money on e-trade.

Incentivized