Employees registering their account on Carta for the first time can now provide their personal information as part of the onboarding process to complete their user profile. 

With an objective to provide insightful experiences, we’ve revamped the employee onboarding process to allow users to complete their user profile. Every employee registering with Carta for the first time to accept their first RSU or ISO/NSO option grant will now have the ability to provide the following information:

• Personal details such as name, date of birth and country of citizenship 
• Tax ID 
• Address

Capturing these details upfront allows employees to be transaction ready for events such as exercising.

 

After successfully completing their user profile details, users will be directed to the Tasks page where they can accept their security.  

Timing

• Available now to 20% of randomly selected Carta customers 
• General availability for all Carta customers coming by the end of Q2

What’s new

Private companies can now report the complete list of all ISO dispositions and see exactly which dispositions qualify for tax incentives and which ones do not, along with Ordinary Income value and other information.

How it works

Under Capitalization > Reports, find the Disqualifying Disposition Report (ISO):

Select the reporting date range, acknowledge the report’s use of in-platform securities and transactions, and then export the report to Excel:

When the report finishes generating, it will be available in the Downloads menu:

The report shows info on Disposition Type, Ordinary Income, FMV and more. In order to be completely transparent, Excel formulas are used for Disposition Type, Ordinary income, First Qualifying Disposition Date, and Disqualifying Reason fields to show how they are calculated:

Who this affects

Private companies with tender offers or secondary ISO transactions captured in Carta.

Timing

Available now for all Private market customers (the Public market Disqualifying Disposition Report is available at request as part of the Early Access release).

Additional resources

For more information around the Disqualifying Disposition Report and underlying data, please refer to this support article.

What’s new?

Carta now supports integrations with 150+ HRIS and payroll providers. Customers that integrate their HRIS with Carta will have access to Pending Stakeholder Terminations, Pending Updates to Stakeholders, and Carta Total Compensation (with an active subscription). 

What are the benefits of integrating my HR system with Carta?

Your organization can unlock a new level of automation that helps you become more efficient and make better-informed decisions about your equity program with Carta’s HRIS integration. More specifically, HR integrations will help your organization in the following three ways:

1. Quickly update employee records

Reduce double entry, win time back, and gain a single source of truth for critical employee information like terminations and employee addresses.

2. Keep employee data synced across systems

With HRIS and equity data synced, you can trust that your information is always ready to take action on. If there is ever a discrepancy, Carta will flag it and make it easy for you to reconcile.

3. Calculate and understand tax impact

Employees’ tax impact has never been easier to understand with salary, location, and equity information complete in one place. Carta can help inform employee tax liability for taxable equity events.

What are the steps to integrate my HR system with Carta?

There are two steps that need to be taken to properly integrate your HR system:

1. Connect your HRIS

There are a few variations for connecting each HRIS system depending on the system’s API configuration. However, this should take no more than two minutes to complete for any provider. Here are specifics for each provider Carta integrates with:

• Rippling
• Bamboo
• Namely
• Finch - Carta uses a product called Finch to integrate with 100+ HRIS and payroll providers, including Gusto, Trinet,  and Justworks. 

Note: Only those with Company Editor, Company Administrator, or Legal Administrator permissions can perform the HRIS integration on Carta. Most HR systems also require the individual authenticating the integration to have the highest permission level too.

2. Match employee records from your HR/payroll system to stakeholder records on Carta

Carta will match the list of employees in your HRIS to the stakeholder ledger in Carta by looking at First Name, Last Name, and Email, then ask you to review them for accuracy. Please see here for how to perform the Employee ID matching process. 

Note: This is a necessary step for you to take to be able to take advantage of integrations.

How do I take advantage of the integrations once I have completed the initial integration?

There are two specific modules that will allow your organization to make use of your HR system integration with Carta: Pending Terminations and Pending Updates to Stakeholders. 

Please see below for how to use these modules to help you manage data coming from your HR system on Carta: 

• Rippling
• Bamboo
• Namely
• Finch 

SPV Formations: Fund of Funds and Audit

What’s new

Carta has been able to perform fund administration for SPVs that are audited and/or fund of funds but now we can form these SPVs as well. 

How it works

In our engagement letter form select the package that works best for you.

Note: if you have a more complex SPV use the link at the bottom of the engagement letter form to get in touch with an account manager. 

After engaging with Carta to form your SPV, we will invite you to complete our setup guide.  Within the setup guide we will generate an Operating Agreement or Limited Partnership Agreement that allows for your SPV to be audited and/or invest in funds.  You and your LPs will be able to sign the document within Carta.

What’s next 

We will continue to expand our SPV Formations offering allowing customers to form SPVs with quarterly reporting, multiple capital calls, premium carry and annual management fees. 

What's new?

Carta will now provide salary + equity benchmarks for the following engineering specializations:

• DevOps + Site Reliability
• Quality Assurance
• UX/Frontend

How can I assign an employee to a specialization?

You can assign an employee to an engineering specialization by: 

1. Visiting the Employee Scorecard page for a particular employee and selecting “Edit” next to the employee’s role and then selecting “Job area and level” on the Update details page.
   
   

2. Select the “Specialization” dropdown to assign an employee to one of the listed specializations.
   
   

Note: specialization benchmarks are currently limited to DevOps + Site Reliability, Quality Assurance, and UX/Frontend for the engineering job area.

How do I see benchmarks for engineering specializations?

You can view benchmarks for engineering specializations by:

1. Visiting the Bands page and selecting “Engineering” under Area. Once the engineering job area is selected, you can change the engineering specializations by selecting the Specialization dropdown.

   
   

How do engineering specializations affect the Employee Scorecard?

The compa-ratio is a quick way to compare an employee's compensation to your plan's target rate for a given job area, level, and location. The compa-ratios for an employee assigned to the DevOps + Site Reliability, Quality Assurance, or UX/Frontend engineering specializations will now be calculated using the target compensation for the specializations.

Improvements to the Employee Compensation Timeline

We’ve improved the employee compensation timeline to make it easier to discern between the various types of equity awards an employee has been issued. 

Benchmarks version 2022-04-13

What changes can I expect from these benchmarks?

We’ve added more than 10,000 new salary data points to our database since the last benchmark update in January. This has allowed us to significantly improve the quality of our model as we compare results to the underlying statistics. Given the increase in the sample we are able to be more granular in our modeling as we look at different job areas and types of employees (ICs and Managers vs. Executives).

While changes to the benchmarks are largely a reflection of modeling improvements, the changes will also reflect salary movements in the market since January.

This benchmark version also includes engineering specializations for DevOps + Site Reliability, Quality Assurance, and UX/Frontend.

What were the largest areas of movement from these benchmarks?

With this benchmark update we observed larger than expected movement across several job areas, driven largely due to increased sample and refinements to our modeling, and less by overall market dynamics. Many of the decreases we observed were in valuation peer groups of $50M and below. The increases we observed were mainly in valuations higher than $50M. In both cases our benchmarks moved closer to the underlying statistics in our database.

Looking by job area, we saw the largest average increases (ranging from 6.5% - 10%) and decreases (all less than 1.5%) in the following job areas:

Increases:

• Project Management
• Customer Success
• Data
• Sales

Decreases:

• Administrative
• Design
• Human Resources
• Marketing

How do I update my plan to use the new benchmarks version?

You can update your compensation plan to use the latest benchmark versions either by:

1. Visiting the Plan page and clicking on the "Update available" link in the Active Plan window.
   
   
2. Navigating to the Bands page and clicking on the "Update" bubble in the top left.
   

You will have the opportunity to preview the new plan with the updated benchmarks version and assess their impact on your scorecard before accepting the new plan.

What’s next?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released 2021 data for US-based geo adjustments. Carta will release a May benchmark update that will include improvements to the geo adjustments within the Total Compensation product.

All Carta Total Comp customers now have access to Total Rewards. 

What’s new?

• Customize and share equity, salary, and benefits information with employees directly through their Carta account. 
• Enable employees to calculate and visualize their equity value based on various exit or liquidity scenarios. 
• Share your compensation philosophy and design custom benefits packages for each employee segment. 

How do I get started?

Setting up Total Rewards is simple. Click here for step by step instructions, or check our Total Rewards User Guide for more tips for how to ensure an easy roll out to your team. 

Corporations  Equity Administrators New Feature 

What’s new

Public markets administrators can now  designate employee groups that require company approval before trading through Carta’s pre-clearance tool. 

Unlike blackout periods, which are in effect for sensitive time periods, pre-clearance applies at all times that the seller is configured to require it. Pre-clearance allows issuers to proactively review and approve or reject seller trade requests when the company is in an open trading window.

Who this affects

Public company administrators, and the sellers that public companies configure to require pre-clearance.

How it works

Pre-clearance populations are designated at the officer code level. Any seller associated with an officer code requiring pre-clearance (with an effective officer code as-of date) will require pre-clearance to trade.

Sellers that are associated with an officer code that requires pre-clearance will be presented with trading request instructions upon portfolio login:

If sellers are not in a blackout period and are only prevented from trading due to pre-clearance, they will be able to request the ability to trade.

After the seller submits a pre-clearance request, the seller will see a Pending status in the portfolio while the issuer reviews the trading request:

• The seller will remain in trade request pending status until the issuer grants pre-clearance.
• Upon request, the issuer receives an email notification that pre-clearance requests are pending.

The issuer navigates to the Pre-Clearance tool to review and either accept or reject the request:

• Clicking Respond allows the issuer to accept or reject the request:

• If the issuer rejects the pre-clearance request, the seller will again have the ability to request pre-clearance and will not be able to place trades.
• If the issuer approves the pre-clearance request, the seller is able to place trades until the pre-clearance window expires.
• Pre-clearance approval is shown in the Open tab. Issuers are able to close a pre-clearance request early if needed.

Sellers can enter Cashless sale transactions and stock sales until pre-clearance expires.

Timing

The pre-clearance feature is now available to all public companies.

Starting in May 2022, we will require that all Carta accounts have two-factor authentication (2FA), also known as Multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled. Investor Services customers should confirm all of their team members have personal accounts properly provisioned and secured with MFA/2FA as soon as possible. 

Why MFA/2FA?

MFA is the industry standard for software companies, like Carta, that store sensitive identity and financial information.

What does this mean for me? 

As we make this change, all accounts need to be associated with a single person’s name. 

If there are multiple people at your organization accessing Carta with the same email and password, you need to take action.  

If you’re not sure, click here for instructions on checking or updating the name on your account.

How can I create accounts for other individuals on my team?

You can add people on the people page of each account by following these steps.

If you are unsure about how to set up access for other members of your team, please reach out to our support team at investorservices@carta.com. 

Why can’t we use two-factor authentication with shared login credentials?

We cannot send MFA/2FA codes to multiple people at once. 

Critically: resetting MFA/2FA can only be done for a person’s individual account. If a team member needs to reset MFA/2FA without a backup code, they will need to get in touch with our team and present a photo ID that matches the name on the account. 

How do I get this process started? 

Our Investor Services support team is happy to help you with this process. Reach out to them directly at: investorservices@carta.com. 

Why is this being required?

A password on its own gives you poor protection from hackers. They can steal them from other insecure websites or via malware, and people often reuse the same password for many accounts or choose passwords that hackers can easily guess. Carta is adding this additional security to protect your account from social engineering, phishing, and other related attacks.

Thank you for being a Carta customer, and we look forward to answering any questions you might have about this change. 

We've updated the Total Comp permissions system with two new role types:

• Area lead: Users with this role can edit employees and view bands for their assigned area(s) and level(s)
• Recruiter: Users with this role can view bands for their assigned area(s) and level(s)

To add a teammate as an area lead or recruiter, go to the Settings > Permissions and roles page click on "Add User" and follow the instructions in the modal.

You will be asked to provide the teammate's email address, assign a role, select which areas that you want the teammate to have access to, and then select the highest level within those selected areas that they can view/edit. You can also change the role and permissions for an existing user by clicking on the action button (three dots) in the user table and selecting Edit user.

Soon, companies will have access to the updated Capitalization > By Share Class view. This page comes with improved performance for large Cap Tables, allowing you to view and interact with your Cap Table up to 5x faster.

To access this view, you can navigate to Capitalization > By Share Class.

What’s next?

We will continue to improve the experience, adding a new summary visualization to the top of the page, and improving the navigability between the By Share Class and the By Stakeholder Cap Tables.

Resources

Support Article: Capitalization Table - By Share Class