Likelihood to Recommend Lime Light CRM was built specifically for online marketers, helping them to manage their online sales, contacts, orders, and payments. The software combines a number of features and 3rd party provider integrations to offer the ability to store customer data, build online eCommerce campaigns, create sales reports, and automate order management activities, as well as track, store and report on affiliate data.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros For an easy to learn CRM this would be it, you can fully train someone on Limelight in less than a few days It allows for various wildcard searches to be performed in different fields, which speeds up productivity and requires less request to repeat information to locate accounts while speaking to clients. The CRM holds multiple user accounts and products, and shows failed attempts to purchase and gives reason codes for why the purchase was not successful. Allows for different views to review client accounts. Read full review Easy to manage and maintain Provides a better end user experience Workflows and automatic emails make the budgeting process much easier to manage/complete API integrations with important tools such as Power BI, Sage Intacct, and Salesforce Easier for Finance to "own" the tool and troubleshoot data issues without having to rely heavily on internal/external Data teams Read full review Cons Note taking can be a hassle, when writing notes there is not a separate tab, or dedicated area which allows for multiple users to leave notes for future users, or administrators to reference regarding actions made to the account, users must search per line item to view notes, or go to a different view to see all notes which is still per line item as you toggle through the notes If the client has been with the product for several months or years it is a lot of notes you have to reference through which hurts productivity and creates longer calls. A huge con is when you are canceling out a user account, or if you are changing a recurring date if the user clicks the back button after the tasks completes refreshing the webpage to reflect the new dates, the new changes will go undone and revert back to the original data as if no changes were made resulting in user error. The client continues to be billed and discounts continue to apply. The CRM needs to fix this to prompt "Do you want to undo discount/date change/cancellation?" if the back button is clicked to eliminate user error based on the software limitations. Features which can be customized to automatically perform after actions are done on an account need a function to allow for agents to resend emails if the user did not get them. If automatic emails go to users canceling and they did not get it you have to restart the product then cancel it again to have another automatic email sent to the client/customer or manually send an email. For refunds, if the automatic email did not go out you have to manually send out the email which is time-consuming allocating to another agent or for the current agent. There is a need for an upgrade which allows that after an automatic email has been sent a button will appear which says "resend cancellation" "resend refund" this should also be true if the user inputted the email wrong and it was only noticed by agent after the automatic email was sent and the agent needs to update the email for the client/customer to be able to receive the email at the correct address. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Customizable Reporting Automatic Reminders Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots