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
Vena
Editions & Modules
Professional
N/A
Complete
N/A
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Vena
Free Trial
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
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.
In comparison to its competitors what has helped Vena stack up against them is its wide range of solutions in specific. Having a curated group of solutions, powered with IT-backed automation, integration with 365 and compliance with the latest trends and legal formulations is …
We did not evaluate any other products. We knew we wanted to embrace, not replace, excel, and Vena is best in class as a CPM tool that leverages Excel as a lens into the database.
Ultimately we decided on Vena because of the Excel interface which we knew would improve adoption. We also like the platform agnostic integration and easy-to-use web interface. The OLAP cube was also appealing to allow for a variety of pivoted reports.
We had quotes from three different companies including Vena. Even with a higher pricing, Vena made the best impression with a powerful software and a solid solution. With another competitor, we would have to engage a bookkeeper to support our consolidation. Vena didnt …
Tableau is by far the best tool I've used. Vena in comparison is very good but it's missing the master data link to SAP, and the ability of data to refresh when the hierarchies move. It's also lacking standard reports on system set up like basic P&L's, etc. It's also missing …
we used Fiserv AML Risk and MPC. Risk was used for ALM (we will still need to find another solution for this as Vena does not offer this). We also used Fiserv MPC for budgeting and forecasting. This system was extrmely inefficient and provided us with many complications and …
Vena being a Excel add in makes it very attractive. Also, there are certain features that Vena had was very fascinating compared to their competitors. It was easy for users to grasp it as it looked and worked just as Excel.
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, …
When debating if we would add Vena Insights to our system, we looked into Tableau and Power BI. Vena was more expensive per user, but because we already pay for Vena for FP&A, it would have ended up costing us more money, time, and effort to maintain a BI system that lives …
I have used products such as Oracle Hyperion and Smartview. There are pros and cons to each (I found report/template creation slightly simpler with Oracle), but they're very similar and achieve the same results.
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.
In other workplaces data has been kept in Excel files saved to individual computers. This makes the gathering and analysis of data much more difficult because it can not often be trusted to be current or accurate. Vena has been a great resource for maintaining data across teams …
We were previously using FRx financial reporting. We were replacing it and looking into Mangement Reporter and Adaptive. Both products seemed too robust at the time. Vena seemed more manageable and easier to use. The investments that Vena has made in their training recordings …
It is well suited for scenarios where a company needs an efficient and scalable solution to implement in their daily products; it eases the work and saves time using Vena. However, I would not recommend this product before analyzing and estimating a budget because it can be pretty expensive for small and medium-sized companies.
It would be great if the templates didn't have to be launched from the download folder for end users. This concept is often confusing for end users and they don't always understand why they can't open the file back up from their downloads folder later on. Might be better if the templates opened in Excel online for end users when a workflow is in play.
The data integration (API) is a bit confusing. All the steps and stages are hard to follow. It would be great if this area could be "dumbed" down a bit further for us non-data people.
Permissions are a bit tedious to set up. We decided to set up permissions using permission user groups instead of task bindings because it would be easier to manage and not accidentally mess up but it still is really tedious because pretty much each person in our organization has to have a separate user group set up for them.
The report books don't seem to work consistently and don't always follow our permission set up so they've not been useful. This is a feature I'd really like to take advantage of but it just isn't quite where I need it to be yet.
The formula (DAX) building feature in Insights is not great. It would be more helpful if it showed you the same tooltips that PBI desktop shows you when you start typing out a formula.
It would be very helpful to be able to drill down on a budget/forecast number and see the LID (line item detail) beneath it and not just the dimension details.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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