Certent Equity Management Reviews

Pros

The software is very user friendly and there are many help articles to help self learn the software. The support team is also helpful.

Cons

Sometimes reaching out to customer service does not yield a quick enough response.

Pros

In my role in our financial reporting department, I solely rely on the accounting/equity reports provided by CEM for our audits, as well as for our SEC reporting (10Q, 10K, and Proxy Stmt). I am extremely happy with the functional capabilities this software provides our Company, as well as very satisfied with the working relationships established with the customer service team over the last 15 years that I have been a user on this platform. The communication and assistance we receive has always been 10/10, and this is a strong reason why we have stayed loyal customers of Certent!

Cons

I honestly do not have any issues and/or problems with any part of Certent Equity Management, as a user. Maybe the only small concern that I can think of is our broker is independent from Certent, so as our employees are vesting their RSUs and/or exercising their stock options, this data is transmitted daily to Certent and since I don't have access to our broker platform. I have to rely on the collaboration of data between these two platforms, which is out of my control.

Pros

Through many bugs and a painful login and re-authentication process every single time I access the platform, I have been able to exercise my options through Certent.

Cons

They take something that is already difficult for many people to understand and make it worse by having a terrible UI, and login and authentication process

Pros

Certent Equity Management completely solved the issues of issuing and tracking employee shares for our company both from the perspective of administration by our finance team but also from the perspective of visibility and access to this value added benefit for our employees! The Certent Support team has been fantastic helping us setup and use some of their standard features in an "outside of the box" way that fits our company's needs, and our account rep [sensitive content hidden] could not be more accessible or responsive when we have questions or need help with creative solutions!

Cons

Would like to have the ability to do some manual adjustments such as changing email address, mailing address, etc information for participants ourselves rather than submitting those changes requests to the Certent Plan Admin team to do, but, at least their team is fast responding to change requests / tickets usually same day.

Pros

My favorite thing about working with Certent Equity Management is the customer service. [sensitive content hidden] Carlson is our Sr. Client Service Manager and she has been since I have been with the company (6 years). [sensitive content hidden] is always available and willing to help and so patient with our team. She set up bi-weekly meetings with HR and Finance teams to talk about any issues. Many times I would ask the same questions but she would answer without hesitation. Running and using reports is easy, and help system with videos is a great idea and has helped me many times with Black Scholes calculations or EVF changes. Accounting team always there to help as well - providing calculations as we need them.

Cons

Not really user friendly if we want to create new reports - Certent would do it for us. Reports already created have a lot of unnecessary columns on them when they are run and there was no way for us to customize to what we needed. Being on the west coast when we are on the east isn't helpful either when we have an early morning question.

Pros

Certent has a lot of customization of fields beyond their generic fields. This has allowed us to filter our reports, broker integrations, etc. based on plans and participants, for example. I love that there is a "sandbox" for testing changes and uploading data before doing so in production.

Cons

In the beginning, we had a dedicated account representative, but that person has changed a few times over the years and we've lost touch. Submitting a ticket for urgent help has been frustrating when I really needed help in the moment and couldn't wait 24-48 hours. I've had some very important settings in broker integration suddenly change without my knowledge, which affected grant and vesting data being sent to our broker. We tried to set up the Section 16 module, but with our company having some legacy plans before we spun from our parent, it was becoming too difficult and too costly to properly pull in that data.

Pros

Certent provides stock plan administration reporting capabilities with multiple reports for both internal and external reporting. Our client relationship manager, [sensitive content hidden], is awesome and has bi-weekly touch base meetings to provide frequent communication.

Cons

Certent tax information connections with our broker are not the best, but mitigating controls are in place to provide accurate data is received by the broker for certain transactions.

Pros

I love their capability on calculating and tracking functions.

Cons

Its not the Certent, but it takes a learning curve to understand the requirements and behavior or the mechanism as I was not a equity compensation specialist, I had to learn from their customer service people about the rules and formulas etc.

Pros

First of all, [sensitive content hidden] and her team are always very responsive to my queries and are ready to assist! The system is very user friendly and the standard reports available meet our monthly reporting needs. We were considering adding these services to our brokerage provider (to consolidate) but decided against it as their Equity Management support does not even compare close.

I also like the fact that the File Management features are now within the Certent Equity Management system.

Cons

Just like all systems, there are sometimes minor quirks in the reports, but [sensitive content hidden] and her team address them quickly.

Pros

The Certent Equity Management is user friendly and easy to navigate and is especially helpful to see the real-time and point in time statistics. The reporting functionality makes it easier to have reliable and efficient reporting. The customer service team is also great to work with, they are very knowledgeable about all types of awards and are timely on their responses. Our customer service representative [sensitive content hidden]
has been a great partner to us.

Cons

Just like all systems, there are sometimes minor quirks in the reports, but once you get the hang of functionality, it is easy to use going forward.

Pros

Real-time equity management reporting is available on one report. Reports are flexible, and can be filtered in many different ways for different purposes. We use for performance based and time based RSUs and RSAs. We do not use the system for dividend/DEU calculations. Most critical reporting is used for SEC public reports, which are just a click away, and used to be manually calculated maintained in excel workbooks. Certent reporting saves us hours/days of manual tracking in excel. Also, our main relationship manager is extremely responsive and patient with our requests/questions.

Cons

Since Certent is not a broker, when we changes from private to public, the connection with a broker has been very challenging. Almost like duplicative work and coding. Albeit, it seems like Certent's customer services is much better than the broker so we are hoping that once connection is made, we won't have any future broker/record keeper issues.

Also, it would be valuable if Certent offered the ability to calculate cash dividends (not DEUs), so that we don't have to track in excel. But this is not a deal breaker.

Pros

I like it's ease of use and intuitive interface.

Cons

It's sometime hard to get the consulting hours from a specialist in the event of an unusual or infrequent event.

Pros

The product works well for what we need it to do. We currently use it to management our equity awards, including maintain our records and issuing our new awards and generating various reports. The best thing is the customer service. Our customer service rep [sensitive content hidden]always responds to our questions timely and let us know when he will be away and ensures there is a backup to help us. He knows the system very well and guided us through during the implementation and provided help as we need in BAU process. Ops also process our requests very timely. They are always friendly and professionally.

Cons

Not very user friendly. We need our customer service rep help to maneuver around in the system or figure out which report to run.

Pros

The Certent software came highly recommended and they have never disappointed. It is an extremely robust and powerful software platform.

Cons

When they got acquired there was decent staff turnover.

Pros

The platform is fast, responsive, and easy to use. Being able to favorite certain reports makes weekly/monthly tasks that much simpler. Certent equity management is fairly intuitive and doesn't take long to get used to.

Cons

Sometime there are accounting differences or errors generated in reports that are difficult to discover until something goes wrong. But our client service manager is very responsive and the accounting team at Certent has helped us troubleshoot as well.

Pros

Certent Equity Management is extremely valuable in my quarterly SEC and investor reporting as well as our internal tracking of stock option expense items. The customer service is consistently exceptional.

Cons

I think the reports are good but I do wish there was some customization available on some. Also, there is limited Pay vs. Performance functionality.

Pros

It has every report you can wish for. The customer service is amazing.

Cons

There is nothing I don't like about Certent

Pros

Certent provides great customer service to our organization. We work hand in hand with them in regard to our equity management and upcoming vestings/settlements. Our collaboration with Certent is extremely helpful and integral in providing our employees with accurate results.

Cons

N/A - I have zero complaints or concerns with Certent

Pros

Being a public company that issues various equity instruments (restricted stock awards, options, restricted stock units and performance stock units) to our employees and consultants we need a solid system that is able to provide the necessary accounting impact in addition to serving the employees/consultants who can track and monitor their individual awards. The system is able to accommodate both of these critical aspects for our company.

Cons

There is nothing that I can think of that fits this category.

Pros

Customer service is extremely responsive and very helpful. I've submitted dozens of cases and usually receive a response in a few hours or less. Also, the "help" topics section is very user-friendly and has a lot of great resources to help me navigate the system and answer my own questions. Certent reporting is also really great when you know what you're looking for and how you'd like to view it.

Cons

The system is not incredibly intuitive (but then again, neither is equity management in general). When entering new grants and/or recording various transactions in the system, it can be difficult to figure out how to do so effectively and efficiently without the help of their support teams. I also don't enjoy how frequently the passwords reset in the system.

Pros

Certent equity management is user friendly, and easy to navigate. Customer service team is very supportive and always available to support you.

Cons

The link between BAML and Certent isn't seamless - there are some quirks that require workaround.

Pros

The software is very intuitive and the reporting functionality exceeds that of competitors. Sandbox environments are excellent.

Cons

It is one of the more expensive options on the market.

Pros

Certent Equity Management is user friendly and easy to navigate. The customer service team is by far the best I've ever worked with.

Cons

There is nothing I don't like about Certent Equity Management.

Pros

It is easy to use. The customer service is great!

Cons

Customer support website sometime glitches, which does not allow to submit a ticket online.

Pros

The ease to work with them. The streamlining of Equity process from issuance to settlement. Their swift customer service. [sensitive content hidden] always gets back to me when reaching out with any questions.

Cons

little expensive other than that, it is good.