Flexibility coupled with a great support/implementation team make Vena a great choice.
February 22, 2022
Flexibility coupled with a great support/implementation team make Vena a great choice.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vena
Vena is used by all budget owners, but primarily accounting and finance. Today Vena is being used as our consolidation system for GAAP financial reporting as well as the main source for budgeting. As an organization, we have multiple ERPs and Vena allows us a simple customizable tool to sit at the center and aggregate data so there is a single source of truth that is not in excel and has detailed logging capabilities to track changes whether it's in budget, consolidation, etc.
- Vena's scoping and project management related to implementations is the best I've dealt with by a noticeable margin.
- Vena is a customizable database that's easy to understand, build, and support, we don't utilize our IT department to use or support it.
- Permissioning users are super flexible, if done properly users can only see what they need to see (so they don't get lost in the details).
- The fact that excel is the main interface is underrated, when we force budget owners to use it, it's pretty seamless.
- The export functionality requires writing queries, while they're not difficult it could be improved.
- Data transformation errors out on the first error, so if you have multiple errors you could struggle to fix one, redoing, fixing another, redoing
- Once you've used and iteratively updated your system/use case, the details (sources, destinations, integrations, etc) can be messy, would be nice to have a systematic way to delete things no longer used or transition to a "clean" data model somehow.
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
- Vena has driven significant operational efficiencies related to consolidation and the audit ability of that consolidation. The implementers really stress that users should improve business processes, and don't just push bad processes into a tool, their expertise was critical in our improvements.
- The only negative impact I've seen is Vena can do so much, I don't feel like we're fully utilizing it to its capabilities.
- Once completed we should gain significant synergies in the G&A expense budget to actual reporting from budget owners, completing with the expert services team, not a formal implementation.
We subscribe to the expert services in addition to our licensing, so our support may not be normal for users who don't purchase that service, but it's nice to have essentially an on-call expert to troubleshoot, or help design processes for new things, train new users, etc. Other than the expert services I have had the need to call support (restore a backup since I deleted it....) which was timely and seamless.
Vena is really enabling the inclusion of more people into the budgeting forecasting process, and thus enhancing the accountability model for budget owners (they provide their budgets, reviewed/updated through process, instead of being handed a budget to manage). If the sum of the parts is not getting to where we want it to be, it's easy to send back for updates or create additional "on top" adjustments that are trackable
- SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
BPC seemed to me to require IT assistance, which was not available. I used it in a past life and thought it was a good product, but when implementing the flexibility and lack of IT resource requirements were the clinchers for Vena.