CARTA CUSTOMER JOURNEY GUIDES

Carta Total Compensation: Getting Started

Contents

Integrate your HRIS
Create your compensation plan
Benchmarking
Settings
Employee leveling & scorecard
Total Compensation Reporting
Bonus & commission plans
Total Rewards Statements & Offer Letters

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How do I make the most out of Carta Total Compensation?

Optimize your compensation strategy, make data-driven decisions, and maintain a competitive edge. This guide walks you through key steps of getting started and maximizing the value of Carta Total Compensation.

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Integrate your HRIS

Integrating your HRIS system is an essential initial step in streamlining your compensation operations

WHY IT MATTERS: Integrating your HR information system provides a comprehensive understanding of

Your current compensation
Where to start with aligning pay and equity structures seamlessly
Laying the foundation for accurate benchmarking and leveling

Ultimately allowing you to make data-driven compensation decisions with minimal manual effort.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: Carta automatically levels your current employees based on certain criteria so your time can be spent focusing on what matters most

Automatic employee ID matching relies on the consistency of both the Employee ID and Email across all systems. You can match employees in the event of discrepancies or duplicates.

Benefits of HRIS Integration How to integrate your HRIS

Create your compensation plan

Your compensation plan establishes a foundation for your entire compensation system, ensuring that market benchmarks align with your company's needs.

What is a compensation plan?

A compensation plan outlines guidelines for employee salaries, bonuses, and equity. Not only does this define pay, but also establishes roles, levels, and performance evaluation criteria.

What are the key components of a compensation plan?

Benchmark Settings: How you want your employees to be compared to the market for reports and market benchmarks

Peer Group: Select a market cap catalog to set compensation targets across pay bands
Compensation Bands: Define target equity and salary ranges for each track, setting a basis for how values fluctuate around your target
Market Position By Job Area: Customize how competitive you want to be for each job area

Location Based Pay: How your pay targets are adjusted based on location

Work locations: Use work location for employee benchmarking
Adjustments: Adjust pay based on local cost-of-labor
Pay adjustment floor: Set the minimum value to geo adjust target compensation
Default location: This will be the default location loaded when viewing the Benchmarks page
International Market Adjustment: Create customized international market adjustments that can be used across your company

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Set up your plan Carta's guide to building a comp plan

Understanding benchmarking

Leverage the world’s largest equity dataset to access real-time market data, helping you make informed and strategic compensation decisions.

What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking establishes salary and equity benchmarks for Roles within specific Tracks. Additional parameters further refine the compensation benchmarks such as:

Peer Group: Select a market cap catalog to set compensation targets across pay bands
Location: Specify the local labor market for the roles being benchmarked. All Total Comp data reflects the local cost of labor
Market position: Select to view benchmarks at 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles

What information can I understand from benchmarking?

Individual Contributor Tracks: Common titles, role descriptions, total cash benchmarks, job area or specialization overview, level description, complexity, autonomy, scope & sample size specific to your selections
C-Suite & Founder Tracks: Common titles, role descriptions, total cash benchmarks, job area or specialization overview, level description, complexity, autonomy, scope & sample size specific to your selections
Option pool & Burn rate: Option pool sizes and shares granted as a percentage of fully diluted over the last 365 days broken down by valuation
International benchmarks: Salary and equity compensation bands for over 40 international countries

Export and share benchmarks for a specific role with your hiring teams

International benchmarking Carta Blog: Salary benchmarking

Total Compensation settings

Configure settings to enhance employee comprehension, manage access permissions, and streamline Total Compensation functionality.

Equity Settings: Control how your company's equity is valued. This value will be displayed in your scorecard, employee details and shown to your employees in their Total Rewards Statements and Offer Letters (if applicable)

Permissions and roles: Control who can access Total Compensation and settings with three different role levels

Recruiter
Area lead
Full Access

Offer Letters: Standardize offer letter settings to streamline and simplify the offer process

HRIS Integration: Create a new integration or understand the status and type of current integrations

Review access levels Total Compensation: For Admins

How to level employees & understand your scorecard

Mastering the leveling process and utilizing the employee scorecard are essential for maintaining consistent, competitive, and fair employee compensation.

How do I level my current employees?

Because you’ve integrated your HRIS system, Carta will do the heavy lifting for you

Text-based matching is used to automatically assign roles when possible. If an exact role cannot be determined, a partial role may be assigned.

How do I manage employee levels?

Using your Employee list

Edit employee levels individually or in bulk
Resources to utilize when reviewing employee levels:

How do I use the employee scorecard?

Filter your scorecard to show the data you’d like to understand including salary, equity, total cash compa- ratio, benchmark location and much more

Compa-ratio: Compare an employee's compensation to your plan's target rate for a given job area, level, and location.
A score of 1 means they are paid at target, above 1 means they are paid above target and below 1 means they are paid below target.

Understanding your scorecard and leveling ensures alignment with new hires, salary adjustments, and equity cycles, establishing a stable compensation structure as your company grows

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Employee scorecard Carta Blog: Job Leveling

Reporting with Carta Total Compensation

Reports designed to support you in making data-driven compensation decisions.

Strategic compensation decisions rely on competitive pay ensuring retention without overpaying, managing equity refreshes, and forecasting your equity pool’s runway in line with your hiring plan. Below are the reports offered and what they contain:

Equity Runway Report: Understand how hiring and retention plans affect your equity pool
Compensation Summary Report: Analyze compensation spend across Job Areas, Locations, and other key factors
Equity Refresh Grant Report: See who may be eligible for a refresh grant and an estimated number of shares to grant
Salary to Market Report: Learn about which employees may be eligible for a compensation review
New Hire Equity Calculator: Forecast the number of shares to allocate for upcoming hires

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Access Total Compensation Reporting

Bonus & commission plans

Create customized variable pay programs across your company to capture the full picture of employee compensation.

Assign bonus and commission plans to employees individually or in bulk, based on three main components:

Flat rate: Specify the dollar amount for variable compensation
Percentage of base: Specify the percentage of base that is from variable compensation
Program value: Specify the value for each level, expressed in either dollars or as a percentage, depending on the program type selected. The value assigned to a given level applies across job tracks.

WHY IT MATTERS: Bonus and commission plans allow you to align total cash benchmarks effectively by integrating your specific bonus and commission structures

Benefits & commission plans are not directly pulled from your HRIS integration

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Bonus & commission plan set up

Total Rewards Statements & Offer Letters

Streamline your offer process, improve pay transparency and help employees see the true value of their total compensation package.

THE IMPACT: Equip current and potential employees with a comprehensive view of your total compensation package through interactive tools to showcase future earning potential and centralize all compensation-related communications

Total Rewards Statements: This statement highlights cash compensation, current and projected value of equity compensation, and employer contributions to benefits and perks
Offer Letters: A fully interactive offer statement that communicates the full picture of a job offer—from salary to equity, benefits to work culture, and everything in between

Benefits & commission plans are not directly pulled from your HRIS integration

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