Centage (Planning Maestro) offers a way to plan, budget, forecast and report financial performance by enabling finance teams
to see into the future, and test the impact of different scenarios, in order to make faster decisions with confidence. The software streamlines the entire planning process, delivering sophisticated financial intelligence to empowers users to make faster, more informed decisions, so they can react quickly to market changes, take intelligent risks and
capitalize on new…
$27,000
per year
Vena
Score 8.5 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.
N/A
Pricing
Centage
Vena
Editions & Modules
Core
27,000
per year
Strategic
39,000
per year
Performance
51,000
per year
Professional
N/A
Complete
N/A
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Centage
Vena
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
—
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.
*Vena offers special pricing for not for profit organizations. To learn more, speak to an expert.
Manager of Financial Planning and Analysis Consolidations
Chose Centage
Our company evaluated 6 product offerings in the market place a year ago and felt Budget Maestro and Vena offered the largest return on our investment at their price points. We have always been very satisfied with the product and its customer service. Since we have grown over …
We selected Vena because it offered the following features: API connection with many of our tools (Power BI, Sage Intacct, Salesforce), worked well with both MAC and PC, ability to set up workflows with automated emails, ability to set up permissions by multiple dimensions, …
Prophix is powerful, and structures data on the back-end in a very similar way with multiple data models, and I have used it before. But the learning curve is steep. Building complex rules, e.g. for a union personnel model, was much harder than designing the same logic in …
We chose Vena mainly due to how flexible it is for our business, and that we would be able to own the software inhouse (finance team) rather than relying heavily on external consultants, just like the case with other software we looked at.
Features
Centage
Vena
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Centage
4.5
3 Ratings
51% below category average
Vena
7.4
126 Ratings
3% below category average
Customizable dashboards
4.53 Ratings
7.9114 Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports
00 Ratings
7.184 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
00 Ratings
7.4122 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Centage
7.0
9 Ratings
13% below category average
Vena
7.6
216 Ratings
5% below category average
Drill-down analysis
6.99 Ratings
8.3208 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
6.57 Ratings
8.2208 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
7.66 Ratings
8.2184 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
00 Ratings
5.683 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Centage
7.4
5 Ratings
9% below category average
Vena
8.2
171 Ratings
2% above category average
Publish to Web
5.51 Ratings
7.695 Ratings
Publish to PDF
8.33 Ratings
8.9127 Ratings
Report Versioning
8.55 Ratings
8.0146 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
7.31 Ratings
8.1132 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Centage is suited for all types of business. This is what makes this tool so great. It requires some expertise in setting it up and depending on how complex the business is, it may take longer than expected. It's a complex system and if you are not involved in the implementtion it might be hard to learn what is does.
Using the Vena's with a user-friendly interface has been incredibly easy. Their server comes with a setup that makes it easy for beginners like me to host account data in a hassle-free manner. The platform is reliable, giving me consistently high performance with a 99.99% server uptime and lightning-fast loading speed.
Planning personnel with all the related benefit expenses is very accurate and we are able to forecast increases as well.
Storing separate versions of the budget allows us to finalize for the year and have access to the data while we update the default plan with any changes.
I ilke the way you can add intelligence see the detail of calculations below th eline item.
I like writing Planning Maestro reports to see drill downs of any item and tie them to our ERP Budget
What i like best about Vena is that it is very seamless Excel integration.
Vena fosters collabs across teams, helping multiple members to work together on financial planning in real-time enhancing overall efficiency.
We now also can automate manual processes like budgeting, consolidation of data and reporting saves my valuable time and also reducing the risk of errors.
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.
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.
Vena allows any solution to be built the way you need it to work, and there are many different ways of going about what you need it to do. It may require time to build, test, and rebuild and retest, before the best solution to what you are trying to accomplish is reached. It is best for those who are Excel proficient because Vena utilizes and enhances the usage of existing Excel functions. For those who are not Excel proficient, the journey may be more challenging, however, with help of EMS, you can get your planning and reporting to a dynamic state.
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
The team makes sure that you get what you need out of the software. They will do whatever is in their power to make sure you're happy and are getting back your investment (time and money).
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.
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.
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 used to use an older consolidating product call FRX or something like that, very manual where accounts were adding line the reporting lines one by one.... Centage is far superior, the ability to create custom Dimension hierarchies as improved our reporting 100 fold
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.
We onboarded the entire company in a very short time frame to complete the full company budget cycle the first year out of the gate. Now we are looking to add more data and the ETL tool makes it easy to backload data into the cube as if was always there. Vena has been very scalable for our needs.
We were a very small company growing by acquisition so it worked well during these phases of our company growth.
The return for our cost was tremendous especially in comparison to peers in the market.
Analytics Maestro allowed us to grow without adding headcount by building efficient reports that can easily be mass-produced for all branches within our organization.