Vena Has Saved Me A Lot of Time
January 07, 2022

Vena Has Saved Me A Lot of Time

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vena

NAMI uses Vena for preparing our annual budget, forecasting throughout our fiscal year, and reporting relevant financial data to individual departments. We also use Vena to create the financial statements we provide to NAMI's Board of Directors. Every department across the organization uses Vena for budgeting and forecasting. Finance and Accounting is the primary user for reporting purposes.
  • Vena is easily adoptable by new users because it is Excel based. Staff are not intimidated by the software.
  • It's easy to distribute monthly reports to the staff with Vena's workflows and Report Books. Once those are set up, distributing monthly financials to individual departments is an easy process.
  • It's easy for us to upload data from our accounting system - at the transaction level - to Vena. We simply download a file from our accounting system and upload it into Vena. Whatever manipulation of the data that's required is done by Vena. We don't have to do anything.
  • Vena's customer service is excellent. Their customer service reps. are pretty good and I will say they are fair-minded during contract renewals. I never feel like they're gouging me. They are decent people to work with.
  • Because Vena continues to experience tremendous growth it is hard (at times) to get access to their internal consultants on a timely basis. It's also hard (if not impossible) to work with the same consultant on an ongoing basis as Vena assigns consultants as they become available to do the work.
  • Because of their growth, the Vena staff is constantly expanding. So, in the five years I've been with Vena, I've had at least six customer service reps... It's not the worst thing but it feels like I'm starting over every year.
  • Vena's software is constantly being upgraded. That's a good thing but I think they might be able to do a better job of providing online training and other training resources.

Do you think Vena delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Vena's feature set?

Yes

Did Vena live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Vena go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Vena again?

Yes

  • Significant time savings in terms of budgeting, forecasting and reporting.
  • No concerns about numbers tying out across the organization - less stress!
Yes, Vena's customer service is excellent and our implementation went very smoothly. When it came time to renew our contract, Vena was very reasonable in its new contract terms.
We produce our financial reports and statements within a day after we close our books every month. So, the reports are available on a timely basis for executives and the Board. Because it's Excel-based, we've taken advantage of Excel's graphical capabilities in the presentation of our financials; some of our staff and Board do not have financial backgrounds so they appreciate financial data being presented to them in an easily understandable format.
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 make most revisions and changes to the software myself (because it's Excel-based) rather than having to wait for a consultant to help me. I do not have time to wait.
I've never looked back from leaving the budgeting system we had before Vena. It's been easy to "sell" Vena within my organization because it is Excel-based so most people, even with just basic Excel skills, can use the system with little training. I started with just 12 licenses and now I'm up to nearly 30. As NAMI has grown so too has our use of Vena; it's easy to scale Vena, i.e. adding programs or accounts or staff into the database is an easy process. I recommend Vena on a regular basis to other companies.

Vena Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
10
Local and consolidated reporting
Not Rated
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
10
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
Personalized dashboards
10
Color-coded scorecards
10
KPIs
10
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
9
Benchmarking with external data
9
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
10
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10