Vena provides flexibility and efficiency to focus on what actually matters

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.

Vena quickly understood our needs and after explaining one of our biggest challenges (consolidating a newly awarded grant into our operational budgets), was able to create a mockup of the process and demo it for us within a couple of weeks. They also allowed us to test the platform from various locations where we work (US, Sierra Leone, Malawi, etc.) and speak with client references before we signed a contract. During implementation, we asked to speak to client references that had worked with our assigned consultant as we wanted to build a coaching relationship so that we could have full ownership of the platform after go-live. That consultant honored that desire and was extremely helpful in getting us to learn key functionality of the platform, so much so that 3 months after go-live, we built another template completely independently. Beyond implementation, there was a misunderstanding of the terms of our contract related to the purchase of additional licenses which would have locked us into an additional payment in our second year, but after discussing our misunderstanding, Vena accommodated us without the extra charge - this showed us that they weren't a company that was trying to nickle and dime us.

One of the major benefits of Vena has been the ability to flexibly make changes across a wide range of users, time zones, and types of input, while also still allowing us to see instantly what is changing. We've had insights into the data and been able to collaborate with our budget and organizational leaders to discuss the impacts of certain activities, make edits within templates as necessary, and then move on to the next pressing topic. We've also shifted to a multi-year view which allows our executive leadership to better plan for the future, as they have more insights into when grant funding is ending and which core activities those grants are supporting.

We don't have many regrets with our process and where we landed, given that we're still using the platform 6+ years later, but I think if we re-evaluated, we would try to involve more members of our global Finance teams to weigh into the process and directly compare Vena with other platforms. Our initial evaluation was one vendor at a time over a few years to determine whether it was worth the jump from Excel based budgets, but a more direct comparison might've yielded a different result.

Vena as a company and the Vena Community of active customers that they facilitate offer a lot of best practices based on your industry. My biggest recommendation is to be open to taking a new approach given that a new system adoption is a good time to change things you don't like about current processes. We very intentionally created exactly the same data structure and template design of our pre-Vena Excel budget files, and only several years later begun reflecting on whether we could've spoken to peer organizations or other Vena clients to consider alternative approaches. Vena's platform allows you to configure whatever you need, but change management can be harder later.

Nothing else to add. We chose Vena because of it's ease of configuring data models and templates to meet our needs without locking us into rigid processes. We haven't had a need to configure the Vena web portal because it's simply not where users spend most of their time - they do their work in templates, which we have full control of the design.

I don't believe we purchased a premium support tier or that one is offered. my understanding is that Vena invests in their support team's capacity to effectively support all of their customers. Over the 6+ years we've been using Vena, every support interaction has had quick responses with knowledgeable guidance supported by knowledge base articles. The team is also quick to offer calls to make sure they understand the issue and resolve things quickly.

We recently had an issue with just one of our templates having intermittent issues loading for four users (out of 200+), where sometimes the template loads perfectly the first time, but sometimes it takes 2-4 tries to open. This felt like a real needle in a haystack type of situation as we couldn't identify a pattern. Vena support provided a series of knowledge base articles to resolve specific error messages, as well as an analysis of the template to identify how the design could be affecting the performance, but also took a deeper look at Event Viewer to see where specifically things were erroring out. This focused on a specific Microsoft DLL file, for which they provide clear instructions on replacing the file and restoring the Vena add-in files. While this was a frustrating error to resolve, Vena support pulled in multiple team members to consider various solutions and provide clear guidance and documentation for how to resolve the error.

Vena integration works well for our primary use case of exporting to our SQL data warehouse and I have seen a lot of documentation and talked to other Vena clients that have created more complex workflows to get data into Vena. If integration is important for you, I think Vena has flexibility to build any integration, but the complexity of the process may range depending on whether your source system is one they've pre-configured or not.

We agreed to an initial 3 year contract with plans to scale up our user license after the first year, as well as discounts on additional consulting hours post implementation. The contract also allowed us to purchase additional licenses as needed, which we decide to do in the first year to expand our user base.

I have found Vena to be a very open and cordial company, with each customer success team member treating me as a partner rather than just a customer. Vena follows through on their marketing of helping to grow your organization by being proactive communicators, asking questions to understand your priorities, linking you with relevant webinars/feature releases and other clients facing similar challenges.