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.

During the COVID pandemic, the airline companies were taking a big hit on travel and I saw this as a great opportunity to invest in airline stock because its value in the market had dropped tremendously. I used this opportunity to invest in multiple airline stocks through e-trade by buying the stock at an all-time low for airline stock. It was a great investment for me in the long term.

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.

• I like their sell orders that allow you to set a price or percentage as a stop loss.
• Their dashboard is easy to use and gives you some quick info.
• I also like E*TRADE's reports for gains and losses.
• Moving funds into and out of your accounts is pretty simple with E*TRADE.

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.

robinhood is similar to e-trade but they are geared more to bitcoin and companies that may not be offered on E*TRADE because they are off-market companies.

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