TrustRadius Insights for Vena are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Live Changes: Users have appreciated Vena's ability to allow contributors to make live changes, making it easier for the finance team to track and consolidate budgeting data effectively. This real-time collaboration feature has streamlined communication and increased efficiency in financial processes.
Powerful Data Management: Reviewers have found Vena's robust data management capabilities instrumental in enhancing forecasting accuracy by leveraging advanced analytics and forecasting models. The system's analytical tools have empowered users to make more informed decisions based on reliable data insights.
Consolidation Feature: The consolidation feature in Vena has been highly praised by users for saving significant time previously spent manually consolidating spreadsheets. By automating this process, Vena has enabled teams to focus on strategic analysis and decision-making rather than tedious manual tasks.
Vena is been used in our day-to-day management of the business. It has allowed us to have full transparency of our business with one source of truth. We also use it for consolidating and reporting our financials internally and externally. Vena has made it much easier for forecasting, budgeting, and modeling the business.
Pros
Control of Month-end close
Drill down of accounts
Consolidating
Controls of users and users group
Cons
Allow to flip the sign on balances
Easier copying and pasting of a whole sheet and the mapping
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena is suited for any service or manufacturing company that is mid to large size.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)
Vena is being used currently by our Finance and Accounting team.
Pros
Consolidation
Integration
Planning/Budgeting
Cons
Support
Export features
Business Intelligence
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena is great for consolidation and budgeting and planning. Can be difficult to use for analysis however, a business intelligence tool more suited for that.
We utilize Vena for all of our operational budgeting across camping. It is the most helpful in forecasting throughout the year to accurately track expenses and make adjustments to the budget.
Pros
Forecasting
Month to month tracking
Review and approval
Cons
Comments being saved from one fiscal year to the next
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena is extremely helpful with forecasting expenses and adjusting budgets throughout the year. I have not experienced a scenario where it isn't appropriate.
We use Vena to budget our operational and grant expenses, as well as process our annual compensation planning as part of our summer performance review cycle. We've also used Vena to plan our capital expense budgets and our detailed medical item and equipment procurement budget in the past. We have 200 users across 10 countries contributing to specific portions of the organizational budget. Vena's Excel interface allowed our users to adopt the platform quickly as we were able to build templates that mirrored our existing Excel templates, while also giving them the flexibility to use other Excel functionality that they're familiar with (i.e. using formulas to populate cells). From the administrative side of the platform, we were able to learn how to build and manage data models, templates and user permissions in multiple ways to suit the needs of our specific use cases. The ability to export and upload transactional data, hierarchies, users and user permissions makes things easy to manage as well. Vena also has robust system audit features that allow you to see what information was saved, by who, and when, making it easier to troubleshoot any issues that come up, particularly when multiple users are collaborating on the same data. The platform also allows you to see snapshots of what the data looked like down to 5 minute increments, which we've used a few times to restore data that was mistakenly overwritten in bulk - navigate to a date in the past, add some query language to narrow your search, export the data to confirm it's what you want and then re-upload it to get back to a good starting point. Vena's real time consolidation has also been a major win for us as we previously only updated our budgets once per month because the consolidation process was manual and very tedious. Since we started with Vena, our budgets are consolidated immediately, and we're able to automatically push that data to our data warehouse to be used for broader reporting. What used to be a once every 30 day process to update the organizational budget is now an automated process that happens each day - a user can enter a new budget line today and see it in our reports a day later. While we haven't yet pushed our accounting system's actual data into Vena yet, we see that as an opportunity in the future to allow users to use that information to immediately update their annual forecasts throughout the year. We also lean heavily on our data warehouse to build our broader reports, but are excited to explore Vena's Power BI embedded feature as it matures and once we are pushing accounting data into the platform. Beyond the technical aspects of Vena's platform providing a lot of flexibility and functionality, they've built a customer community that allows customers across different industries to discuss best practices and new ideas, and have built a steady stream of webinars with industry experts.
Pros
Flexibility - design the data model, templates, and permissions your organization needs
Usability - the Vena web portal is clean and easy to navigate, checking files in and out is straight forward, and users have adopted templates quickly
Community - from training, knowledge base, discussion boards, webinars, and repeating Customer Success calls, Vena stays in touch with customers regularly and uses feedback to improve the platform and partnership
Cons
Macros to Product features - some customers may need to build VBA macros within their templates to supplement specific actions within a template, though Vena actively reaches out to understand those use cases and considers adding those most common as product features
Integrations - Vena has been building native integrations to major systems over the past several years, but my team would have preferred an option to more simply connect to a SQL database and define all of the mapping ourselves (Vena API's were just announced so we might not be far away, but as yet have not been able to implement this type of integration)
Workflows - it might just be that my organization doesn't like to adhere to formal workflows processes, but we have yet to adopt them within Vena because the user's changes are committed to the database before approval and we don't want unapproved changes flowing into our data warehouse. If we could easily have unapproved data tagged in a way to keep it filtered out, that would make workflows more enticing
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena is great for organizations that are comfortable using Excel and require lots of flexibility as it allows you to design and build your templates in exactly the way that you need. It's also a good match for organizations that have disparate users contributing simultaneously because it's permissions allow for everyone to work in a standard template while only being given access to edit the data for which they're responsible. If you have a team that has internal capacity to manage your systems, Vena as a platform allows you to expand beyond your initial implementation independently without needing to go back to a consultant to make an adjustment or start a new project.
Used across the entire company for planning and reporting. Gives managers access to transaction detail and timely data. Quarterly forecasts have made planning agile and up to date based on operational changes.
Pros
Flexibility in planning models.
Report distribution.
Accurate data.
Automated processes.
Cons
User permissions.
Task bindings.
Changing and moving hierarchy members.
Likelihood to Recommend
Fast-growing business, where needs are always changing. Templates can change with the business easily as it all excel based, so if you can think of it in Excel, you can turn it into an automated template Template automation is by far my favorite feature of Vena and has allowed me to remain a one-person team even though the company has grown many times over in a few short years.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)
Vena is being used by our Finance and HR team; it helps us in Planning and budgeting. It helps us in comparing our financials and enhances cost-effective future budgeting. All the personnel and non-personnel expenses are very well managed; it also helps us in data integration and visualization, which in turn helps in decision-making.
Pros
Budgeting
Planning
Forecasting
Managing HRIS.
Cons
User Interaction.
Latency issues.
More interactive spreadsheet in Excel.
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena would be very helpful in building Financial reports and all required audit reports. It would help in Financial planning and analysis and decision making. It would also help in human resources, managing all the employees moving and out their costs and also automatically impact the financial. It might also be helpful in building dashboards if understood well.
We utilize Vena for budgeting across 18 countries and for consolidated reporting of our financials. Additionally, with the Power BI connector, we are able to bring our financial data, operations data from Salesforce, and HR data from our HRIS system into one environment. This allows us to create dashboards for each department, but also allows for a consolidated CPM use case.
Pros
Easy to build templates or integrate existing templates
Workflow creator with approvals
Security controls - One template with many views based on a user's permissions
Excel based so easy to make the transition
Cons
Workflow management - The workflow status tracker is only available when logged into Vena and cannot be distributed through automated or scheduled email notification
Not mobile friendly - Since reports/templates are in Excel and require the add-in to view, you cannot access your data on a mobile device
Admin support for add-in - The add-in can be cumbersome for end users not familiar or used to working with more advanced features in Excel. Additional support and training are necessary to help users troubleshoot when data does not automatically appear when opening an Excel file.
License cost structure - Vena recently changed their licenses to include a view only license. This license is extremely limited and will not allow for simple approve/reject reviews. Additionally, the cost of 1 admin license (necessary to build workflows, templates, and reports) is excessively overpriced compared to the other offerings.
Likelihood to Recommend
Vena is a great product that provides a centralized location for all of your budget and financial data. The ability to create workflows and not have to worry about data consolidation during the budget process has allowed more time to complete detailed reviews of each individual budget. It has also provided us with the ability to quickly create budget adjustments as necessary that roll up into the existing budget. While reports are easy to create, distribution has been hit or miss dependent on the end user. At the end of the day, it is another system they must login to in order to view. It also works well if you have a centralized business model with only 1-3 admins (FP&A team) creating and controlling the files and workflow processes. If you hope to empower other key individuals outside your FP&A team to build their own reports though, it becomes cost prohibitive very quickly.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Finance and Accounting (201-500 employees)
We implemented Vena for the planning and budgeting process, reporting, and consolidation as well in combination with Fluence. On the other hand, we also use it for more non-financially driven functionalities like resource planning or project risk management.
Pros
Facilitate collaboration across the company
Workflow management
Cons
Industry Solutions (Best Practices)
Reproducing templates
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited to collaborate with departments overarching within your company. For example, setting up a budget where several departments need to deliver their input and you will facilitate the process, and keep an eye on the process. I think it is less appropriate for organizations with a low maturity level in finance, as the tool is really flexible, and if you don't have a clear vision of your needs, maybe Vena is not the way to go as it will not guide you in the process. It's really open/flexible to set up, so you need to know what you want.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Finance and Accounting (5001-10,000 employees)
