Carta Erfahrungen

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.

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.

- 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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Uncluttered user interface. Very obvious where to click & navigate. It's nice to track my overall equity and individual grants. The best feature is the ability to simply forecast overall share allotments across varying vesting schedules.

There isn't a robust feature set beyond the basics to track your equity, but I'm not sure how much more I would need for that.

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.

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).

The pages were easy to navigate and well laid out.

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!

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.

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

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

- 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.