Unanet CRM by Cosential vs. Vena

Great for medium and large construction companies that have a specific salesforce.

Incentivized

Does a fantastic job of keeping snapshots of your work and requiring far less horsepower on your local machine. I appreciate the familiarity of the Microsoft Excel front end, especially when you have to adapt models often in a fast-paced environment. I do wish there were easier ways to expand working templates and models on demand to see all selected locations or departments, and to separate tabs for easier comparisons while modeling. Once you learn how it varies from an Excel-only environment, it proves its worth as an enterprise tool.

Incentivized

• Inputting of companies and leads who may become prospects.
• Creating specific opportunities for construction projects.
• Tracking opportunities through the entire sales cycle.
• Inputting detailed notes and activity by the Sales team.

Incentivized

• 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

• The open software is somewhat difficult to master as an administrator.
• Report writing could be more intuitive.
• The company seems to cater to larger users.

Incentivized

• 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

Cosential is very intuitive for the AEC industry and has the ability to be customized for your specific needs. The reports are especially helpful, with good visual dashboards.

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

My original trainer / implementation specialist was fantastic. That relationship has continued, even though I have been officially handed off to the customer service side. The customer service side seems to have higher turnover than normal, but in general they are also very supportive, although not as responsive as I might like.

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

Cosential is specific to the A/E industry and is the most intuitive software we found for construction.

Incentivized

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.

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

• Allowed for common tracking by business developers in different regions.
• Helped us quantify effort.
• Provides great reports for management.

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