Product is complex. We use an outside consultant to manage.
December 12, 2012

Product is complex. We use an outside consultant to manage.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with EASi

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • We had to have an external consultant oversee and manage the software for us. It wasn’t easy enough for us to use on our own. Some of that may be because of the feeding of information between EASI and UBS Onesource software which is used for participant management of equity awards.
  • We just have read capabilities in-house and the ability to set-up new users. Anything needed to uploaded we have to send to our consultant, Plan Mosaic, to upload.
  • While some of the reporting is good, some is not that good. You are able to generate reports in PDF and download into Excel. However, some of the reports in Excel would dump a lot of unnecessary information and require you to do a lot of manual clean up.
  • It saved us a full time headcount of someone manually tracking all options. Most public companies have someone dedicated to stock plan administration, or at least a 0.5 FTE. We didn’t have that luxury here.
  • However there are costs. We have to hire a consultant Plan Mosaic to work with the system that costs $2k/month. I am not very happy with them. They are a really small shop, so you don’t have a lot of people you could call to get stuff done. Only 1-2 people can get things done for you.

Using EASi

4 - 3 primary admins in finance and one IT license – more for testing and security.
We are periodically setting up new users, deleting people who’ve left.
  • Track our stock plan database – from initial grant to any type of stock split, any terminations, exercises.
  • For internal administration efficiency – not driven by Sarbox.
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.

Evaluating EASi and Competitors

Equity Edge from e-Trade

EASi Implementation

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.
  • Professional services company
Plan Mosaic

EASi Training

  • Online training
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.

EASi Support

We do not access support directly. We go through Plan Mosaic.

Using EASi

Pretty easy to go through and learn on your own.

EASi Reliability

I can only remember a couple of times when cannot access the system.

Integrating EASi

  • UBS One Source
Manual data feed, they send every night.

Relationship with EASi

I wasn't involved - happened before I joined.

Comments

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