Kepion Planning vs. Vena

The solution works extremely well for companies in complicated operations or with the ambition to forecast their operations on a driver based way or wanting to have the ability to create different scenarios based on external or internal drivers. It is a perfect piece of an existing analytical infrastructure (DWH/BI) lacking a planning solution on top.

Well suited: 1) Small & medium companies that are using MS Excel to manage their FP&A process will benefit immensely from Vena as it will save them time. 2) Prepare budgets and forecasts - once you set up your various models (Rev, Opex & Capex) its very easy to create a budget and/or forecasts. 3) Managing the budget process - for larger companies you can manage the whole process within Vena. Vena is less suited to multinationals with a significant number of subsidiaries and companies and where inputs are required from many people. The Excel nature of the templates can be error prone. I am also not sure who effective Vena is when working across multiple currencies.

Incentivized

• Budgeting and Forecasting: Kepion provides all budgeting, forecasting and actuals information in one, collaborative environment.
• Analysis: It is easy to traverse across your entire budgeting and forecasting spectrum in Kepion, unearthing insights that would be hidden from you in other tools.
• Workflow: Kepion's workflow management is simple and clear.

• Bringing all of our financial processes together in one place
• Helps Operations and Finance to see what is happening in real time at each site.
• It makes the budgeting process very easy for Operations to input and Finance to go in and check alongside at the same time.

Incentivized

• Silverlight functionality is outdated which makes the front end solution a little bit old compared to latest UI. They will be tackling it in Q2 2018, but it leaves users wanting for more.
• Reporting functionalities: Are not state of the art, we recommend users creating official reports within Kepion, but focusing on Tableau or PowerBI for reporting purposes as this is not and will never be Kepion strengths compared to the likes of Tableau.
• Being customizable is great, however, the solution is not an out-of-the-box solution and does require a little integration to work. For smaller companies (under 5M USD) I would still recommend Excel.

• Seems like notification capability could be expanded to allow for more customization and flexibility of notifications
• Out of the box account reconciliation functionality needs some adjustments: should reconcile total ending balance, not change in balance. Little more intuitive and intentional setup for users to attached supporting documentation.
• Need to investigate improved processing power for Insights to ensure even complex dashboards can run quickly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Kepion is in a unique position in that it has all of the enterprise-grade functionality and scalability of a tool like Cognos, but it is available at a lower price point, with much more engaged support.

Offered the most familiar front-end with Microsoft Excel to mitigate the learning curve. It also provided enough flexibility without external consultant support to enable easy self-service. Flexibility was a critical factor in the decision, as the industry I am working in is not mature and requires constant iteration on models and assumption configurations.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Eliminated the necessity to manually combine multiple Excel budget worksheets into one file in order to compile an org-wide budget
• Allows end-users to be self-sufficient by having the ability to drill into transaction-level detail and conduct ad-hoc analyses
• Created more bandwidth in the FP&A team to spend more time on more meaningful analysis

Incentivized