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Easy Navigation and User-Friendly Interface: Many users have praised Carta for its extremely easy-to-navigate platform and user-friendly …
Overview
What is Carta?
Carta (formerly eShares) is cloud software that allows private companies to manage and interact with their share- and optionholders. Accoding to the vendor, companies can easily issue stock certificates individually or in bulk, and shareholders can receive and view their…
Recent Reviews
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
What is Carta?
Carta (formerly eShares) is cloud software that allows private companies to manage and interact with their share- and optionholders. Accoding to the vendor, companies can easily issue stock certificates individually or in bulk, and shareholders can receive and view their shareholdings across all private companies on one screen.
Carta Competitors
Carta Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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Reviews and Ratings
(45)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Easy Navigation and User-Friendly Interface: Many users have praised Carta for its extremely easy-to-navigate platform and user-friendly interface. They have found the clean layout of the app/tool to be intuitive, making it effortless to track and manage shares/benefits. This has not only made the process exciting but also helped upper management remain transparent and honest about promised rewards.
Helpful Documentation and Support: Several reviewers have highlighted the value of Carta's Help Center, which they describe as seriously well done. Users appreciate that Carta has a vast database of articles and help documentation, covering a wide range of topics. This comprehensive resource provides guidance on various aspects related to equity management, ensuring that users can easily find answers to their questions.
Streamlined Equity Management: A significant number of users have commended Carta for streamlining equity management processes. The platform handles all stock certificates for investors, simplifying stock option maintenance, cap table maintenance, and scenario modeling across multiple companies. Additionally, from issuance to approval and exercising, the entire stock option life cycle is seamlessly managed within Carta
Lack of Integration with Accounting/HR Platforms: Some users have expressed frustration with the lack of integration between the software and accounting or HR/payroll platforms, which results in manual input and potential errors. They suggest integrating the software into these platforms to reduce the need for manual input.
Issues with Stock Calculations: Several reviewers have encountered issues with the auto-generated Excel file for stock calculations, requiring assistance from technical support to correct these errors. This has caused inconvenience and delays for users who rely on accurate stock calculations.
Inadequate Customer Support: A number of users have expressed dissatisfaction with the customer service provided. They mention slow response times from the live chat team and a lack of acknowledgement or resolution for reported software bugs. Improving response times and addressing reported bugs promptly would greatly enhance user experience.
Based on user reviews, the most common recommendations for Carta are as follows:
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Seek alternatives or consider hiring someone to manage Carta. Some users have found Carta to be buggy and difficult to use. As a result, they suggest exploring other options or outsourcing stock management tasks to professionals.
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Utilize support and have all necessary information available for quick setup. Users recommend taking advantage of the support provided by Carta to effectively navigate the platform. They also advise having all relevant information readily available during the setup process for a smoother experience.
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Understand cap tables and communication tools. To fully utilize Carta's features, users recommend investing time in understanding cap tables and familiarizing themselves with the platform's communication tools. This will enable them to make the most out of the software's capabilities.
Overall, while some users highlight issues with bugs and complexity, others emphasize Carta's value as a tool for stock management, producing investor documents, and keeping employees informed about vested options. It is recommended to carefully evaluate these factors in relation to individual business needs before implementing the software.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Carta is used for managing our capitalization table. This includes the issuance of stock options and the maintaining of stock ledgers for each class of stock. Carta also has a service for conducting and preparing our 409 ( a ) valuation each year. Additionally, our investors are able to request data from us through Carta, which provides an easy way to correspond on sensitive data.
- Stock option maintenance
- Cap table maintenance
- 409 ( a )
- Scenario modelling
- Online help
- Support documentation
- Highlighting errors
December 30, 2020
Carta with bugs
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It is managing our stock certificates and issuance. It is being used by the organization to track the shareholders.
- Streamlines the stock certificate
- Cost effective
- Software has bugs
- They do not acknowledge the bugs or fix them.
- Poor customer service
March 26, 2020
Carta - A fantastic product
Carta is being used by our organization to manage our entire equity process. All stock options are issued through Carta along with any stock certificates associated with fundraising rounds. We have used Carta's data room feature to efficiently manage our fundraising due diligence and the extensive reporting features are very helpful for tracking our option pool.
We also utilize the expense reporting features to record our stock option expense each month.
We also utilize the expense reporting features to record our stock option expense each month.
- Expense Reporting - GAAP compliant and easy to manage, a report is run monthly and provides all the details needed to book the expense.
- Equity Manageent - All stock certificates for our investors are held in Carta making Equity easy to manage.
- Stock Option Issuance - Options are issued in Carta and the entire option life cycle from issuance, approval, and exercising is handled in Carta.
- User Interface is very easy to follow.
- Support is very responsive and helpful.
- Numerous education articles available to all users.
- The Board room feature is somewhat lacking. We investigated incorporating this into our Board meetings but it didn't have enough features for us.
November 08, 2019
Carta - Happy user at 2 companies, including my current one!
We currently use Carta as our official record of all stock option grants to employees and equity grants to investors. All holders of equity awards must log in to Carta to view and accept any offerings.
Carta allows for us to have one central source of truth for all things equity, which is a necessity for any startup. It also allows the accounting team to automate the recording of all stock compensation expense required for US GAAP purposes, and it generates the support for all required footnote disclosures. To calculate all of this manually would be nearly impossible.
Carta allows for us to have one central source of truth for all things equity, which is a necessity for any startup. It also allows the accounting team to automate the recording of all stock compensation expense required for US GAAP purposes, and it generates the support for all required footnote disclosures. To calculate all of this manually would be nearly impossible.
- Streamlined and efficient UI.
- Automatic calculation of all necessary accounting computations and footnote disclosures, properly support for external audit purposes.
- A central source of truth for both internal (like accounting and legal) and external (outside counsel) stakeholders in the equity process.
- 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.
September 13, 2019
Carta -- the best central location to manage your equity
Carta is being used to manage stock options and RSUs within our company. As a growing startup, gaining equity in the company is top of mind for many employees joining and Carta makes managing that equity extremely simple and streamlined. Each interaction I've had with the platform has been intuitive.
- Simple and intuitive interface.
- Makes managing multiple companies stock options very feasible.
- Integrates with our SSO.
- Training on getting more from the platform.
- Could be more clear on setting up notifications upfront.
- Concept is new to a lot of folks, could more proactively educate users on managing equity.
Carta is being used to track, provision, and approve the shares and RSU gifts within our organization. All members of the org here are using it and is helps everyone really understand where their shares stand and when each portion will be vested. The transparency and peace of mind the tool provides are priceless.
- It is extremely easy to navigate and understand the app/tool itself.
- The clean layout make tracking and managing our shares/benefits easy and exciting.
- This helps upper management remain transparent and honest about what is promised and when it should be rewarded as time passes.
- It would be great if we were able to link our 401k to the app and have all benefits in the same place.
- I think that an occasional training or resource provision on the best ways to use our options would be helpful.
- Mentorship and guidance upon IPO or Acquisition would be a really cool benefit to our younger employees.
January 04, 2018
Carta!
The company I work for currently utilizes Carta to manage our company shares vesting sequences. It tracks the maturity of your vested shares as well as our strike pricing. Carta has seemed to take care of the needs thus far of managing our employee stock options thus far. It's better than having to do everything in a non-digital medium.
- Carta tracks my vesting schedule.
- Carta allows for me to know how many shares I have.
- Carta is unintrusive. They don't spam me with notifications.
- Their live chat team takes a while to respond. They could improve their response times.
- Their support team is okay...
December 21, 2017
Carta Does It All
Carta is being used as our internal Employee Stock Option software for all employees who currently have Employee Stock Options across our entire organization. Rather than needing to complete tons of manual paperwork every time my ESOs vest, I can easily login to Carta and locate all of the paperwork I need including reminders of how I filled it out last time.
- Well Constructed UI - One of the most important things for any software I use is how well constructed is the UI. In Carta, the icons are clearly visible and understood intuitively. Certificates can be clicked on to display all relevant ESO information. Issue dates, share amounts, cash cost are all front and center for easy visual consumption. This has the side effect of making Carta easy to use, which is something that all web app software should try and do.
- Ease of access - Getting started with Carta was really easy (also helped that our HR department sends you an email with ESO info if that is part of your employment contract). Once things got going, I really only needed to login to Carta once every vesting cycle to review my available shares and make a purchase.
- No Nonsense - The concept behind no nonsense is a little more art than science. Carta tackles one thing; ESO solutions. It does not attempt to beat around the bush with other features or ideas that might be secondary or tertiary to their primary focus. Instead, they only work towards building and supporting ancillary features and interface choices.
- Help Center - Seriously. Well. Done. Carta has an ENORMOUS database of articles and help documentation. Just about anything you could want or need help on is right there.
- Two Factor Authentication - Just when you thought you were safe from thing sin the world, EQUIFAX gets breached. Fortunately, Carta has wisely considered the advantages of 2FA and enabled it!
- With all of the time I've spent poking around, learning, and utilizing Carta, I can confidently say that nothing stands out as needing glaring improvement or attention. I usually have more to say when it comes to this type of feedback, but find myself sorely lacking.