Vena vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Vena
Score 8.6 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
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.N/A
Pricing
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
Editions & Modules
Professional
N/A
Complete
N/A
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional DetailsProfessional Plan is the most flexible way to get started quickly and add as you grow. The plan includes: Growth Platform, Customer Success Manager, Standard Support and Customer Portal. Complete Plan includes everything in Professional, plus: Microsoft Power BI Embedded, Premium Support, Sandbox Environment, Expert Managed Services and more. *Vena offers special pricing for not for profit organizations. To learn more, speak to an expert.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
Considered Both Products
Vena
Chose Vena
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, …
Chose Vena
The decision to go with Vena was based mostly on flexibility.
Chose Vena
When looking at other tools, we were concerned about end user adoption and Vena stood out because of the use of Excel. It is a familiar format and provides almost endless flexibility when considering business processes that can be added. At first, Adapative was a front runner …
Chose Vena
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 …
Chose Vena
I really like Vena for organizations with smaller finance teams. Excel is at the heart of Vena so there is a less new technology for them to learn. All three solutions have strengths that make them appropriate for specific organizations.
Chose Vena
Vena doesn't require technical knowledge to build reports, so maintenance of the system can be maintained by the finance team.
Chose Vena
Vena is much more user-friendly in my experience, especially for non-accounting employees.
Chose Vena
Vena allowed for the most customization that made everything easy for us with our complicated system of managing allocations across products and time by employees.
Chose Vena
We went with Vena because of its ease of use, i.e. the ease in which the staff was able to adapt the system and use it. We went with Vena because they were very reasonably priced - a huge consideration for a nonprofit like mine. And, we went with Vena because I am able to …
Chose Vena
At the end of the day, Vena offered great value without having to involve IT. It was an easy to implement system for us. We could query the data from our financial system and created a process to send it to Vena using Box and Microsoft Power Automation (formerly Flow). Because …
Chose Vena
Clearly a better fit for our company from a culture perspective. Adaptive sales team was super pushy and not a good fit for us. Also, the system would have LET us work in Excel, but that was not its main interface.
Chose Vena
We selected Vena because it was moldable to our disparate systems. Ideally I'd have something sit natively within our ERP. But since our data points come from places outside of the ERP we needed something we could quickly and easily leverage and use Excel as our basis because …
Chose Vena
We were using Dynamic Budgets before we moved over to Vena and researched many, many, many other products before settling on Vena in the end. One of the things that quickly knocked out other vendors was our unique fiscal calendar. We have 13 periods (4 weeks each) and that …
Chose Vena
Selected based on ROI for the size of business we were and where we were on our data journey. Vena still has great functionality for where it is positioned and the additional functionality we can get from other tools is not quite justified for the jump in cost as yet.
Chose Vena
The key differentiator for us was the Excel-basis for the tool.
Chose Vena
All of the products we reviewed essentially re-create an Excel template in a browser, but without all the functionality that Excel provides. The solutions we reviewed require formula syntax to be learned as the syntax is different than Excel formulas. Some of the solutions …
Chose Vena
We spent about a year and a half in the selection process for our budgeting system. The issue that we kept coming across was speed, flexibility, and a lack of understanding of our process during the sales cycle. Most of these other products wanted us to change our budgeting …
Workday Adaptive Planning
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
After researching several CPM products, Adaptive and Prophix actually both met our needs quite well. The Adaptive Sales & Design Team went above and beyond in the early stages of exploring whether Adaptive could meet some of our very specific needs. Adaptive's customer …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive was more flexible, able to be maintained without heavy IT involvement, cost effective, had no additional hardware requirements, and since it is a cloud platform, updates are automatic.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.7
86 Ratings
7% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.3
1 Ratings
14% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.648 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.875 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.782 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.1
174 Ratings
3% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
4% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.7167 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.4166 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages6.848 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.4144 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Vena
9.0
132 Ratings
10% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
2% below category average
Publish to Web9.262 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.091 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Versioning9.1109 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.798 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.1
77 Ratings
6% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.7
1 Ratings
1% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.569 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.353 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.459 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Vena
9.2
168 Ratings
5% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.0
1 Ratings
3% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)9.0157 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model9.2156 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.3159 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control9.222 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.2116 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Vena
9.1
80 Ratings
13% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.5
1 Ratings
6% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access9.277 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile8.966 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
Comparison of Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.7
210 Ratings
4% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.7
174 Ratings
4% above category average
Long-term financial planning8.7187 Ratings8.5160 Ratings
Financial budgeting9.2202 Ratings9.0171 Ratings
Forecasting8.6193 Ratings8.7166 Ratings
Scenario modeling8.2172 Ratings8.9157 Ratings
Management reporting8.8199 Ratings8.4171 Ratings
Consolidation and Close
Comparison of Consolidation and Close features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.4
182 Ratings
4% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.6
140 Ratings
6% below category average
Financial data consolidation9.2155 Ratings7.8105 Ratings
Journal entries and reports8.0110 Ratings7.967 Ratings
Multi-currency management7.2103 Ratings6.880 Ratings
Intercompany Eliminations8.2102 Ratings7.659 Ratings
Minority Ownership8.666 Ratings7.935 Ratings
Local and consolidated reporting8.5134 Ratings8.593 Ratings
Detailed Audit Trails8.8161 Ratings6.9116 Ratings
Financial Reporting and Compliance
Comparison of Financial Reporting and Compliance features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.5
200 Ratings
3% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.5
162 Ratings
3% above category average
Financial Statement Reporting9.0180 Ratings8.7143 Ratings
Management Reporting8.7185 Ratings8.5157 Ratings
Excel-based Reporting9.3194 Ratings8.1156 Ratings
Automated board and financial reporting8.8139 Ratings8.6135 Ratings
XBRL support for regulatory filing6.445 Ratings8.625 Ratings
Analytics and Reporting
Comparison of Analytics and Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Vena
8.7
148 Ratings
8% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.7
132 Ratings
4% below category average
Personalized dashboards8.4121 Ratings7.1114 Ratings
Color-coded scorecards8.990 Ratings7.394 Ratings
KPIs8.9105 Ratings8.1107 Ratings
Cost and profitability analysis7.9116 Ratings7.6111 Ratings
Key Performance Indicator setting9.1103 Ratings7.995 Ratings
Benchmarking with external data8.877 Ratings8.366 Ratings
Integration
Comparison of Integration features of Product A and Product B
Vena
9.0
196 Ratings
8% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.3
152 Ratings
0% below category average
Flat file integration9.4156 Ratings8.8118 Ratings
Excel data integration8.8180 Ratings8.1146 Ratings
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources8.9143 Ratings8.1112 Ratings
Best Alternatives
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
Small Businesses
IBM Planning Analytics
IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Planning Analytics
IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Centage
Centage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Centage
Centage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Score 8.2 out of 10
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(214 ratings)
8.9
(203 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(18 ratings)
7.7
(43 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(25 ratings)
9.0
(109 ratings)
Availability
8.8
(6 ratings)
7.3
(11 ratings)
Performance
8.4
(6 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(95 ratings)
8.1
(33 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(3 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Online Training
8.8
(3 ratings)
7.3
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.6
(4 ratings)
9.4
(27 ratings)
Configurability
8.2
(3 ratings)
8.2
(5 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.8
(3 ratings)
8.2
(8 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.8
(6 ratings)
8.6
(12 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.7
(3 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.8
(3 ratings)
6.4
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
VenaWorkday Adaptive Planning
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena Solutions
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
Workday
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
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Pros
Vena Solutions
  • 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
Workday
  • It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
  • It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
  • It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Read full review
Cons
Vena Solutions
  • 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
Workday
  • Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
  • Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
  • List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
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Likelihood to Renew
Vena Solutions
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.
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Workday
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
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Usability
Vena Solutions
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
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Workday
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
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Reliability and Availability
Vena Solutions
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
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Workday
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
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Performance
Vena Solutions
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
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Workday
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
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Support Rating
Vena Solutions
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.
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Workday
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
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In-Person Training
Vena Solutions
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.
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Workday
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
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Online Training
Vena Solutions
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.
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Workday
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
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Implementation Rating
Vena Solutions
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
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Workday
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
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Alternatives Considered
Vena Solutions
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.
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Workday
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Vena Solutions
No answers on this topic
Workday
Good read only seat access
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Scalability
Vena Solutions
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.
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Workday
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
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Professional Services
Vena Solutions
No answers on this topic
Workday
This is now available in house at Workday which is convenient.
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Return on Investment
Vena Solutions
  • 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
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Workday
  • Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
  • One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
  • Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.
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ScreenShots

Vena Screenshots

Screenshot of Operation Expenses - Predictive AnalysisScreenshot of Allocations DashboardScreenshot of Vena Add InScreenshot of Power BI DashboardScreenshot of Revenue and Sales PlanningScreenshot of Corporate Dashboard - Workforce Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning Screenshots

Screenshot of Adaptive Planning balance sheets.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning expense variance analysis report.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals with drill-down capabilities.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning in-sheet visualizations (waterfall chart)Screenshot of Sparklines are used to visualize trends and make adjustments visually