BlackLine's cloud-based financial operations management platform unifyies data and processes, automating repetitive tasks and enhancing accountability. BlackLine solutions for financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting support large enterprises and midsize companies.
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Vena
Score 8.2 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
No
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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The Professional Plan is the most flexible way to get started quickly and can be added onto as a company grows. The plan includes: Vena Platform, Customer Success Manager, Standard Support and Customer Portal.
Complete Plan includes everything in Professional, plus: Vena Insights, Premium Support, Sandbox Environment, and Expert Managed Services.
For a limited time, new customers who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Online) as their primary ERP can get a free year of Vena and 40% off implementation costs.
Vena also 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 …
BlackLine lacked nothing in capabilities compared to the competition and was best in class in the categories that meant most to us: transaction matching, partnership approach, data integration, price
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 …
They have superior database capacity due to the power of the cloud. Usability and user adoption is quick and immediate due to the direct integration with Excel and ease of use for end users and Vena administrators.
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 is well-suited for us when it comes to the bank reconciliations, as our systems feed right into BlackLine, and the various match sets reconcile the data effortlessly. BlackLine would work to its fullest extent if all departments utilized it, so you can take advantage of all the various products that are available.
I find it well suited for month end close sheets that we use between our Operations and Finance teams. I also find budgeting very easy. Reporting is easily the #1 for me where it feeds from our accounting software but can be seen and used by our Operations team. It also integrates with other software that we use so that Finance can see details of what Operations inputs.
Segregation of duties - allows for a formal way to ensure that there is a separate preparer/approver for a given task or reconciliation.
Provides visibility - having account reconciliation data in one place has automated processes that were once very manual, and involved multiple team members aggregating data.
Streamlines communication and status of close - having all tasks in one place, in the same format gives us the visibility needed to manage our close process, and know the status of items that are still pending and open for action. This was previously a game of telephone between staff, managers, and leaders, and now has been automated via tasks.
Automation/Optimization - BlackLine provides a lot of opportunity to automate certain reconciliations based on thresholds, rules, and templates. This allows the team to use that time for researching actual issues, and keeping our balance sheet reconciliations clean.
On the home page I can see Team Assignments usually first time not My assignments.
JV posting is slow.
Many error emails about failed JV with the same context.
We receive emails about task certification. Can we receive the list of reconciliations monthly?
Posted/prepared JVs cannot be deleted from the to-do list (there is only one extraordinary case, where we had a BL issue and the JV was booked but without a Document ID).
It could improve the ease of implementation; it could take a long for an inexperienced IT team.
From the ERP system perspective, it can be linked easily, but it has room for improvement when you make core changes and require a Vena specialist again.
Some administrators can get confused while working on Excel implementation; it has complicated technical requirements.
BlackLine has made our finance team more effective and accurate. Our current ERP system is unable to do any sort of financial activities currently being done with our BlackLine licenses. Prior to BlackLine everything was done manually through Excel and stored in binders. There was no option for a paperless process. We are now 100% paperless in our close process, freeing up time, space and saving money on office supplies.
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.
I would rate Vena's overall usability as an 8 out of 10. Vena offers a user-friendly interface, especially for those familiar with Excel, making it relatively easy to use. Most features are intuitive. However, some advanced functionalities may require more training or time to master, so it's not a perfect score. Overall, Vena provides a solid user experience that supports efficient financial planning.
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.
Vena has been available and running. There are notifications well ahead of scheduled maintenance and so far, scheduled maintenance has been occurring during off hours and fortunately has not occurred during a time that is crucial for us to be actively using.
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
Since implementing Blackline, our support team has had quite a bit of turnover, and as such, it has taken longer than normal to get meaningful resolutions to our issues. The people we have worked with have all been great and responsive. However, the turnover has definitely had an impact on our experience.
They are very quick to respond when you submit a ticket and typically fix issues quickly as well. I only didn't give this a 10 because there is still an open issue with our Salesforce connection that we've been waiting on now for a few months.
Our initial in person training was a little rough b/c I felt like our trainer wanted to focus on maximizing Vena rather than understanding what we were needing for our organization. He was very responsive and added insights, but could have worked to understand our needs a little better.
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 training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.
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 of the other products, but we did evaluate them during our discovery phase. BlackLine was the "Cadillac" of the product offerings. You could get a similar product, and maybe even at a lower cost, but we wanted the best of the best, and that's what BlackLine is. We wanted a product that we could grow into, rather than a product we would outgrow over time as our organization grows. We have only touched the surface with BlackLine so far, and we've already reaped the benefits.
Vena Solutions stands out due to its familiar Excel-based interface, making it easy for our team to adopt without extensive training. Compared to alternatives like Anaplan and Oracle Hyperion, Vena's strong customer support and efficient automation have significantly reduced our budgeting cycle time. We chose Vena for its seamless integration with our existing systems and substantial time-saving benefits, ultimately enhancing our decision-making process.
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.
Vena solutios is a software that provides robust tools that help different departments in their statistics and we can visualize a lot of promising and visually attractive data. Vena Solutions' level of scalability is high and sustainable over time thanks to the fabulous technical support that is ready to help us at all times
Talent retention by creating roles with value-add work and reducing the mundane.
Promotion opportunities for those that have embraced BlackLine and have taken on more complex and more rewarding work as a result of the automation achieved.
Time savings which allowed teams to take on new projects without increasing headcount and without employee burnout.
