Certent Equity Management Pros and Cons

Financial reporting functionality & online grant agreement functionalities Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Custom reporting functionality & no functionality for viewing different tabs simultaneously without having to navigate away from other windows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The reporting tools are great and very helpful. It is easy to view and search any grants or participants. You can manually enter information or through an upload. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Their support team/system can be better. While they have a tool to look things up, it is easier to call in or email if you can get a hold of them, usualy takes a very long time. It would be nice if they offered a better training of their system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Certent is user friendly. There are a lot of video walkthroughs that can help users in terms of setting up the correct data.

I love that is supports both US GAAP and IFRS requirements and allows users a great level of flexibility in handling and entering data.

I also enjoy using it when doing Capitalization Tables and rollforwards as the reports are easy to generate and the data is easy to interpret. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As with other equity compensation management platforms, there are still some bugs that need to be fixed. However, the technical team is very responsive when a bug or issue is reported. One of the urgent issues that need to be fixed is the incorrect number of vested award shares that are showing in the Plan Reserve History report. In addition, I think they need to provide access to the sandbox (echo) environment to all their clients, especially if Cetent is planning to remove some functionalities in the production environment (such as the ability to model exercises). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With the ability to link the software to the broker's software, prepare/export monthly journal entries, and prepare financial statement footnotes for 10-Q and 10-K reporting, Certent saves our company a significant amount of time and effort around this process and compliance. Relatively easy to do award modifications when needed also. The upload templates make it easy to add large amounts of data in terms of grants and exercises in to the system. The availability of different types of reports make reviewing transactional activity as well as accounting and disclosures very easy. Prior to implementing Certent, we manually calculated all of our journal entries manually because we did not have a system that we could reliably assure the completeness and accuracy of the data. Certent's solution and reporting capabilities have allowed us to get comfortable relying on a system to pull all journal entries for the month. We used to have one FTE supporting stock-based compensation, and using Certent has allowed us to have stock-based compensation be only 10% of someone's day-to-day activities. We are always looking for efficiency gains and this system has helped us to achieve a lot in this area. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

System could be designed a bit more user friendly. Since Certent acquired EASi, the color scheme changed on the site, but I didn't see much functionality added to the site to improve user experience. The system operates largely as it has from the time we implemented many years ago. One functionality Certent does not have yet is the ability to indicate individuals as 162m (ineligible for compensation expense deduction on corporate tax return that would remove any DTA from being calculated). This requires us to run manual reports on a monthly basis in order to ensure we are posting accurate DTAs on awards granted to individuals who are designated as 162m. We do grants on an annual cycle, so this isn't extremely burdensome, but definitely adds an extra step in the process.

One more thing I wish the system would improve on is their reports. They added in the past year or so the ability to customize reports, including column headings, which is useful. The vast majority of their reports contain a significant amount of columns, which isn't always a bad thing because the data you are looking for is generally there. However, there are many instances where we have to hide a ton of columns or rework the reports to show only the information we need while making it user-friendly for another to review. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The reports in Certent are very helpful. The reporting tool enables us to save favorites for each quarter-end, and also makes it very easy to look up a variety of equity information in just a few minutes.

I also really like that Certent is linked to ADP and Bank of America Merrill Lynch through the HR Connector tool to make our equity management process with our participants more seamless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike that we have to work through a help desk versus having a dedicated client support contact to either call or email for assistance. It would be a lot easier to have a direct contact for support related issues. It is great that Certent has both a general support and accounting support team, but it would be more helpful if we had a direct contact for each. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The service desk personnel are very responsive. They are also experts in the field of equity compensation accounting and will do their best to ensure you get the accounting right for your specific transaction, no matter how complex or obscure it may be. The reports generated by the system are easily audited, which is good from both an internal controls standpoint and from an external audit standpoint. Any summary report used for disclosures can also be ran as a detail report to aid in completeness and accuracy testing. The tool is quick and allows many users to be in the tool at the same time. The roles are very distinct and allow for some users to just generate reports and not make any changes to the awards. The sandbox provided by the tool is very good for experimenting and seeing what will give you the results you need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In the past, the SSAE 18 report provided for the firm had certain holes that caused headaches on both an internal control and external audit side, as the client would have to have compensating controls in order to make up for the internal control deficiencies. This has improved over the past few years, but there's still some reports that are used during the equity process, such as for EPS calculations, that are still not covered by the SSAE 18 report. I would like to see more of those reports tested. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Certent Equity Management platform is an essential part of me managing our stock options and ESPP contributions. The customer service team is outstanding. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No complaints. It is a fairly pricey service but it is necessary for our business. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Solid features and an easy to use package. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like having an integrated broker that can control the product development and interplay. It is difficult to work with a broker and Certent in some cases because of the competing interests. Certent is a fantastic partner but can't control the broker priorities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Certent platform is excellent when it comes to public company compliance and reporting - they provide SOC 1 reports for audit comfort, reliable disclosure reports, and verifiable compensation expense calculations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My one experience with Certent that was fairly negative was with their Accounting Services team a few years back - I haven't used them since, but I found their offerings didn't decrease my workload at all as an outsourced service, but instead actually increased mine and the time to get things accomplished. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The thing I like about Certent is the user interface is really easy to use. We looked at comparable systems by all the big names, and Certent was just the simplest to implement and use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One downside is that the system only allows you to automate one kind of grant in terms of acceptance of the form. Luckily we mostly only use one type of equity awards but it would be great if it allowed automatic acceptance of multiple grant types so it was less manual to do other types of awards. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.