BlackLine automates the the processes required to finalize periodic closing of the books. Beyond close/reconciliation management the product includes capabilities to enhance the management and control of financial processes throughout the accounting cycle. In October 2020, BlackLine acquired Rimilia, an AR automation solution. Rimilia's capabilities are now part of the BlackLine platform.
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Vena
Score 8.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Vena Solutions provides a financial process automation solution to automate Corporate Performance Management, accounting and budgeting, Regulatory & Compliance, and other finance-related processes. It is scaled for medium to large-sized organizations.
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Pricing
BlackLine
Vena
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
N/A
Complete
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BlackLine
Vena
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Professional Plan is the most flexible way to get started quickly and add as you grow. The plan includes: Growth Platform, Customer Success Manager, Standard Support and Customer Portal.
Complete Plan includes everything in Professional, plus: Microsoft Power BI Embedded, Premium Support, Sandbox Environment, Expert Managed Services and more.
*Vena offers special pricing for not for profit organizations. To learn more, speak to an expert.
Blackline outperformed both FloQast and Vena in our RFP. The staff felt that Blackline was the most user-friendly. Both FloQast and Vena try to sell you on linking to already saved documents instead of saving documents onto their systems. They're both more of an Excel …
Vena and BlackLine essentially did the same thing in terms of account reconciliations. However, BlackLine is more of a household name and we had heard testimonial's from other similar companies who liked the product. Thus we did not want to take the risk of using a newer …
BlackLine and Vena are similar in ways that they can help analyze the GL for any variances or discrepancies. At face value, you might think they are separate flows and do not cross. But with the ability to do account recs within Vena, there is indeed overlap. We are in the …
Verified User
Contributor
Chose Vena
As our company grows we need more efficient ways to manage profits, employees, working in a pandemic/hybrid situation across multiple states and more. We have continued to experience rapid growth and found Vena and the Vena partners are the best at simplifying the information …
At the end of the day, Vena offered great value without having to involve IT. It was an easy to implement system for us. We could query the data from our financial system and created a process to send it to Vena using Box and Microsoft Power Automation (formerly Flow). Because …
BlackLine has worked well for our companies, as we have a very old ERP system that is limited to what can be done within the system. Everything was done manually through Excel and binders to keep everything together, and each location had their own way of closing, so there was no consistency. It took longer to complete our close, and it created opportunities for a lack of separation of duties within the process. BlackLine has everything in one place, easy viewing of past months, strict separation of duties implemented (based on your specifications,) easy viewing for an auditor to get everything they need without a lot of hands on from the team, and works the same across all of our global locations, but in their local language and currency. BlackLine may not be a huge assist to those that have ERP systems that can handle doing the Recs, the JE's, the approvals, etc., all within its own system, as long as every location is on the same system. If they are all on different accounting systems, BlackLine can assist in providing consistency across all accounting locations, so processes can be the same no matter where they are located.
Vena is very well suited to handle budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. The platform is very flexible, and I have been able to create some great reports that has allowed our team to deepen our analysis of our organization's performance. I also use Vena for other data storage and reporting, such as creating a site code directory for our field staff, developing an invoicing schedule for our AR department, and creating a workbook to facilitate calculating and reporting on our site staff mileage stipends.
Saving time! Our manual process became automated the minute we "turned on" Blackline!
Focus! By saving time using Blackline, our employees are able to focus on other job responsibilities and profit-generation
Support! Blackline's support throughout our implementation and post-implementation has been exceptional. We always receive timely responses and get answers fast, when needed
User Friendly! Their system is very easy to navigate. Even individuals in our organization that don't like or embrace change said the transition to Blackline was smooth and painless
Early functionality for Oracle users - a lot of the new products are only for use by SAP users.
Access to API data to improve the reporting of data out of BlackLine.
Ability to create reports in BlackLine across data sources.
Ability to email reports out of BlackLine (either ad-hoc or scheduled reports) as opposed to the current process of having the user access BlackLine to retrieve the report.
I have trouble logging into the Zoom meetings and have missed several meetings because of not being able to log in. That is likely due to limits from our IT department and probably not a Vena issue.
Sometimes I need more of an explanation or can't find the article I need in the Vena knowledge base. Also, some of the explanations leave me more confused about what I need to do to achieve my objective.
When we implemented Vena, the implementation team created a template for our unallocated lab expenses, but I wasn't able to effectively use it.
Because this is a great tool with many possibilities and cool perks. Plus, as an admin - because I am both user and admin - I can say that this is easy to handle, you don't even have to be able to write a single piece of code to do so
Vena has been a huge win for us as an organization, as it vastly improved our budgeting process by removing manual consolidation that was incredibly time consuming, and it allows us to see a multi-year view of our organizational budget across all of our funding sources. We've seen Vena's platform grow over the years and we've not yet fully adopted some of them so it feels like there's still potential to get even more value out of the platform.
BlackLine could use a little work in getting around the system. The interface is not without its issues including lots of scrolling up and down and a lack of using the entire screen. Importing of the initial setup data could be better defined and reimporting data to add additional fields could pose an issue of overwriting data in a negative way.
This is split between usability from an end-user perspective and administrative. Administrative - The tool is lacking in a cohesive way to administer the tool, both from more of a back-end perspective (ETL/Integrations, scripting, etc.) as well as from a business administrative (Processes, Models, etc.). On the more back-end IT related aspects, the tool is a mishmash of modules that were clearly developed in stovepipe fashion. Basic feature/functionality aspects such as version control, auto vs manual save, etc. differ between the code preparation components. It is also lacking in any sort of coherent version control. Not all pages display the context information, so extreme caution must be used. There is also no coherent migration strategy. The process and model navigation has been somewhat challenging for our business administrators, often requiring assistance from Vena when creating or altering templates. 2 of 10 End User - This is better. The Excel add-in generally functions well. Creating basic templates is straightforward, and there is a large degree of flexibility when creating reporting templates. Being part of Excel puts many users into a comfort zone. The toggle switch between template and data mode is not well conceived, and the add-in pop-ups occasionally have issues on multi-monitor displays. 6 of 10
We never experienced an outage with BlackLine. The only time the system was unavailable was during planned outages for updates and upgrades usually Friday evening after 6pm pst until Saturday morning at 6am pst.
Contact with Vena Solutions technical support is quick and experts in the field always respond. It is not necessary to go through a large form to explain the problems and then answer more questions to receive a direct answer, we simply send a message indicating the specific problem and they are immediately there to actively help us
Vena Solutions pages load quickly and only a few times does it get a bit slow, only when there are many integrations and the reports are long. But in general it is always fast and honestly I am very satisfied with the speed in the generation of statistical reports and the pages
In my experience, the support team is beyond exceptional. They are incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to the customer. You can expect prompt, professional and succinct responses. I have been working with the support team for BlackLine for more than ten years where I have been a customer four times. If anyone does Support right, it is definitely BlackLine. Not only can you trust your financials, but you can trust the team to support you through all your objectives!
From initiate setup to going live, Vena's customer representatives and technicians have proven to be responsive and enthusiastic in getting our company up and running. They have been patient with our questions and frustrations and worked to troubleshoot issues that have come up.
The original training was onsite and over two weeks. Since our original onboarding the company has come out with a training website to aid in user self directed needs.
Trainings are available for all topics on the BlackLine U portal. These were incredibly helpful when first starting with BlackLine to get the hang of it. Trainings are useful for any module. I have personally used this to teach myself how to use the tasks and variance modules, which are now fully utilized by my organization. The support team is also very helpful in training our team on anything additional we have needed.
The online training was effective, it would be nice to see a more personalized solution. I understand the training is tailored for all industries, but it would be nice to see industry-specific use cases.
You will have to meet up with your final users, approver, internal auditor and accounting policy holder. Everyone has to agree. When you have a well written process, workflow, policy, approval requirement, and control, your implementation process will be much easier
The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates
I have not used any products similar to Blackline. However, Excel does offer many similar functionalities to Blackline in terms of reconciling accounts. Blackline offers many benefits over simply using Excel. The reconciliations are organized and easy to find, and they roll over each month on their own. They include the ability to auto-certify if they meet the criteria that your team selects. They also include an audit trail of documentation and approval for each step.
Vena has better reporting and budgeting functions than NetSuite Budgeting & Reporting when we compared the two. The Kansas City Chiefs currently use Vena and they had nothing but good things to say about it so that gave us confidence to go with Vena.
After implementing BlackLine our company acquired another large company with multiple operations. We were able to use the COVID shutdown to bring them on board with BlackLine with little effort in the setup and training of the users.
We use Vena across 10 countries and 200 users who are located in a wide range of settings and internet reliability. Even with that wide implementation, the most common issue we run into is a new hire not installing the Vena add-in, which is a super quick fix. Depending on our user's location, the internet can sometimes be spotty, but that is outside of Vena's control and even in those settings, Vena might take a little longer to open a template, but it still does open and the user can complete their work. Over 5 years of using Vena, we've collectively only had 3 issues where we needed Vena support to help look at a specific issue a user was having.
More insight into balance sheet account balances. Our team is more timely with getting errors fixed and monitoring important accounts.
The task management tool helps us ensure that we are completing all accruals and reviews each month. This has led to fewer errors and missing accruals.
Our use of BlackLine has greatly increased our efficiency by reducing manual work.
Saved considerable time for monthly close by streamlining reporting and entries
Saved considerable time and effort for reconciliations by standardizing input and output and ability to send reviews to different users and track completion
Saved a lot of headache when tracking down variances
