Carta reviews

Super easy to keep track of my stock options

Opmerkingen: Overall it is simple and easy to use and makes it easy for a company with a large number of employees to keep track of which people have which vested stock options.

Pluspunten:

Love how Carta automatically updates me as to when I have more vested options and shows a progress bar as to how far I still have to go for all of my stock options to vest.

Minpunten:

No complaints but I probably haven't used this software at a deep enough level to truly find anything difficult or something to dislike about this software.

Essential Tool in Equity Management

Opmerkingen: - Investor equity management
- Employee equity option management
- Cap table management
- 409A valuation

Pluspunten:

- In-depth knowledge database that gets you started quickly - Easy to use interface that allows for efficient navigation - Carta combines equity and salary compensation benchmarks and adjusts for size, location, industry - Well structured reports, funding overviews, cap tables, and ability to create a data room for investors - Free annual 409A valuation report

Minpunten:

- Expensive for startups - Salary compensation tool should be included in base subscription - More comparative details with similar companies (benchmarking functions)

Love-Hate Relationship with Carta

Opmerkingen: I have nothing else to compare Carta to, so I don't even know how to respond. On a positive note, I suppose I can list 'Carta' as a skill on my resume, though I don't know whether I would want to deal with Carta ever again if I seek different employment.

Pluspunten:

When I have issues with this software (which is often), Carta's support team is usually very responsive and will work with me on the issue. The software itself works fine, I guess, as it rarely has technical problems. The offered tutorial does help, and I appreciate the Carta team for putting the tutorial together.

Minpunten:

Not very intuitive to use! A major part is requiring a good foundation in securities and stock options knowledge, which I clearly do not have. One HUGE gripe I have with Carta is that there is no quick way to bulk update a set of option grants, but rather I have to go into EACH option grant, upload the document I need to upload, add a note of what I am updating, wait for 5 seconds for the update to occur, and repeat with the rest of the 1000+ option grants. I have been uploading/updating these option grants for a few days now while trying to do my other work, and I am still updating as I write this review on a Saturday evening. I don't know whether to keep on updating while cursing at the Carta screen, or just call it quits for the day. Also, the update generates an email notification for the option holders, and of course a good amount of them send me questions afterwards despite our team having already prepared a mass message for our Chief Sales Officer to send out that explains these notifications. I'm at the point where I'm inclined to curse out the next sales employee that asks me what these Carta notifications are for.

Carta - all-in-one Equity management for privately held companies

Opmerkingen: 5-star. I have a been a Corporate Securities Attorney for 20+ years (15+ years in house) and Carta is my favorite application for privately held entities. It has saved countless hours in spreadsheets, providing a turnkey solution that is accurate and easy to administer for the Board, Investors, and Employees.

Pluspunten:

Equity management is turnkey. Ability to share with our Attorneys and Accountants. Ability to quickly pull data and reports for outside Funds and Auditors. Self-serve option portal for Employees.

Minpunten:

Some of the nuances are complex, but the Software works. It takes some training, but the effort is worth the time to keep all your Equities in a single ledger.

Great tool for equity management

Opmerkingen: Great for cap table management. Customer service is also excellent.

Pluspunten:

I like that it is commonly used in tech companies so many investors are already comfortable with it.

Minpunten:

Some functionality is difficult to locate and the help function references a different version of the software than i have.

Eshares to Carta

Opmerkingen: We started with Carta when it was Eshares. Prior to using this software we were tracking everything in an excel spreadsheet which was a complete cluster. Now we can easily pull reports for information on the shareholders. The only difficulty I have encountered is the lack of a report that my auditors will accept without manipulation from myself. Still way better than manual tracking.

Pluspunten:

The ease with which data can be entered

Minpunten:

Reports for Audit purposes can be painful

Simple But Gets the Job Done

Pluspunten:

If you're looking for a simple piece of software to track employees' options and their vesting schedules, Carta gets the job done. Employees will be notified as options vest over time, and can even simulate exercising their vested options.

Minpunten:

The average person does not understand what options are, or how vesting schedules or exercising options works. Carta could improve this experience for users by perhaps incorporating basic explanations of terminology into the software (ie: with info buttons next to certain terms). This would certainly give users an increased understanding of and sense of control over their financial assets.

Work on the ease of completing deals

Pluspunten:

It saves time and effort by giving up tiring spreadsheets that consume a lot of time and require a lot of manual operations. When I encounter a problem, Carta support team is usually quick to respond and works with me to solve the problem and is also easy to use, which makes work on developing data with high accuracy

Minpunten:

I don't really have a complaint about Carta other than that it's hard to back up

Stock Options Made Easy

Pluspunten:

Carta helps us track all of our company's stock options in one place, providing simple reports and instant changes to our cap table.

Minpunten:

Changes to Stakeholders now require more steps than they did in the previous format, it is a bit more time consuming when making a lot of changes.

Best in class?

Opmerkingen: For how large and popular Carta software is, I expect a higher level of support and functionality.

Pluspunten:

Carta is very convenient if you want your employees (and ex employees) to be able to track their vesting over time.

Minpunten:

We've had issues with several aspects of Carta:-onboarding - we were not set up with the right vesting schedule and several employees that were terminated in our system are now showing as continuously vesting-customer support - when these issues were brought to Carta (and in our eyes, fairly urgent) it was extremely slow to get a response. Our issue took several weeks to resolve - even though employees had access to the system and could see incorrect shares.-functionality - I would love the ability to input more information on our equity program for employees, but the system is not as customizable as we'd like.

Huge timesaver, great value and has improved continuously over time

Pluspunten:

It solved a hugely expensive problem very easily (I used to have to manage our cap table in excel, print out paperwork and issue my own stock certificates. However, every time I look at software options, I was stuck going back to the same system. Using lawyers is truly insane cost-wise, so we manged it in-house. I talked to users of all competitive products and every single one noted errors in those products that led to board-level action and highly expensive fixes. This is NOT something you want to mess around with. Carta, however, was FAR superior to all other options in ease-of-use, accuracy of data, security, rapidity of product development, and ability to scale along with our company. They could make any adjustments needed without the needs for costly external counsel or board interaction.

Minpunten:

When we first started using it (nearly 5 years ago), we found a few bugs in accounting reporting on edge cases (we had a couple outlier cases unusual for a company of our size at the time ). The Carta team quickly made adjustments to their software to resolve the problems however (and have continued to respond quickly to feedback).

Imposible to use because its always so SLOW

Opmerkingen: The CEO's and law firms that use it seem to be happy with it, as an investor user, I literally cringe every time we get a new stock cert from Carta because it takes so long to do antying.

Pluspunten:

In theory, it should be easy to manage our portfolio of over 50 different holdings.

Minpunten:

We are investors, not issuers. As investors, we have 3 big issues. A). The site is SO SLOW, I literally end up e-mailing the portfolio company to ask for the information. B) The UX for the portfolio is nonsensical. For example, if you accept a certificate, you are not taken to the holding,s rather to some summary page from which you then have to search for what you just accepted and if you are not in the right "portfolio", it doesn't show up. C) Carta makes it very difficult for one to keep a backup.

IPO was a debacle

Pluspunten:

The pages were easy to navigate and well laid out.

Minpunten:

Carta’s handling of the Affirm IPO was a debacle. I believe that Affirm no longer works with Carta as a result. Every employee’s sell order was accidentally canceled on the day of the equity release. Carta did not have any alerts system, and did not notify affected employees for a month. Some employees were left tens of thousands of dollars worse off than had the error not occurred. I would generally be concerned about the quality of their software. Amusingly, one employee had $50K worth of stocks go missing from their account. Carta’s software engineers had to deploy a bug fix for these stocks to be visible again!

Once top shop for cap table management

Pluspunten:

Very easy to use Option grants to employees are all done through the software There are reports for all our needs, from stock based comp calculations, min disclosure for financial statement audits, etc... Customer support is top notch. Chat feature allows you to live chat support team with minimal wait time.

Minpunten:

Reports take a very long time to populate and the files can be extremely large. Some report files are over 20 MB's

Great App for Managing Private Equity

Opmerkingen: Overall, it's been awesome using Carta. It's a great tool to manage private equity. I'd highly recommend this.

Pluspunten:

- Keeps track of multiple companies in a singular account - Great data visualization tools for exercised vs. vested, etc. - Repository for pertinent documentation

Minpunten:

- Mobile application is lacking some features that the web app has (i.e. documentation repo). - Sometime difficult to understand the workflow required to accomplish a task. There are multiple ways to do the same thing, which can leave the user feeling a bit lost at times.

Great Program

Opmerkingen: I use for equity tracking for grants of RSUs and options

Pluspunten:

Love this to track options, RSUs and shares. Support is also helpful and does its best to answer questions.

Minpunten:

The commissions on sales are a bit over the norm for a retail brokerage-type program. Especially bad if you have small lot sizes

For a Start-up, this is a great tool to manage your equity

Opmerkingen: Overall, Carta Equity Management allows us to track and record equity along with sharing the information with the employees. It also provides us the reports to book the quarterly stock based compensation.

Pluspunten:

Carta is fairly easy to navigate, as the administrator I can answer questions employees may have as far as vesting and their options.

Minpunten:

Some of the reports are not easily identifiable, you have to select the options you want when running the report.

Simple way to manage equity in a startup.

Pluspunten:

It's easy to see when I can exercise shares, and it's easy to see my current holdings.

Minpunten:

It's such a bare website. I would like some more features, maybe educationally-focused links and ways to track the value of the shares, if there is any information.

Carta does everything to avoid providing service and still charges a premium

Opmerkingen: Most of the time I don't know they're there, because I don't need them. When I do need them, it is a consistently horrible experience.

Pluspunten:

I don't find the software to be very intuitive or helpful. It does appear that the people behind it know the business domain, but beyond that I can't say much for it.

Minpunten:

Their customer service is impossible to reach, and when you reach them very unhelpful. They clearly don't value their customer relationships. They check in periodically to see if they can upsell me to add-on products that aren't useful to our business.

Great Cap Table Management and Scenario Modeling

Opmerkingen: Overall, I am very happy with Carta.

Pluspunten:

I love having an up-to-date Cap Table at all times and being able to model exit and funding round scenarios quickly. Integrated stock ledger and 409A valuations are a plus, too. I plan to implement investor and board communication into the platform this year.

Minpunten:

I wish the scenario modeling provided optionality around convertible notes. But the file outputs allowed me to manipulate the data once in excel very easily. And they were presentation ready.

Easy way to manage stock options

Opmerkingen: Overall I have had a positive experience with Carta and am glad it exists to easily manage stock options.

Pluspunten:

Their documentation and blog are very helpful in understanding all the terms and nuance of stock options.

Minpunten:

There is nothing that I don't like - the software does a solid job servicing our need for managing stock options.

Easy way to monitor employee stock options

Opmerkingen: Overall, Carta has been a useful tool for managing and visualizing my employee stock benefits.

Pluspunten:

I'm not a finance expert, nor a lawyer. That's why I like Carta so much for managing my employee stock benefits. It keeps all the records and information in a single place that I can access easily, along with helpful guides and tutorials for what everything means. I also really like the interactive vesting schedule/option exercise calculator. They are both quite helpful in visualizing stock benefits.

Minpunten:

I don't really have a complaint about Carta other than I wish it integrated with other employee benefits platforms, like Justworks. Obviously Carta is much more specialized than Justworks, and there are probably legal/security reasons it is separate, but it would be cool to have everything in one place.

Step by step and very informative

Pluspunten:

I like how for every piece of information, Carta has detailed explanations for it. It's great for new people who are not familiar with how option grants work. Interface is clean, and I like the different animations when you sign or purchase grants. Also like the monthly email about the vesting progress.

Minpunten:

Don't really have any problems with the software. I am just a user of the tool with very limited permissions. There is not much I can do on the site.

Good Cap Table Management Software

Pluspunten:

Carta is a very cool cap table management software with various functionality answering the majority of the needs of a startup for this kind of software. The UX is very nice and easy to use.

Minpunten:

One of the downside of Carta is its CS. As long as everything is working it's perfect but when you need their CS you will have to wait a long time before your problem is resolved

Great equity management system

Opmerkingen: Overall, this system makes it really easy to understand your equity.

Pluspunten:

Overall, Carta makes it really easy to not only view your holdings, but each individual grant and what has vested. It also allows you to exercise options that are available to you.

Minpunten:

Our company went through a re-price so all old grants had to be cancelled and reissued. It's not easy to tell which grants are active vs which ones are voided.