Overall Satisfaction with Vena
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 been a great partner to work with. 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. Their support staff have been responsive and knowledgeable and their knowledge base articles and Vena Academy (training) were helpful in getting us up to speed and as a way to keep up with new features.
- 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
- 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
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
- Our FP&A team spends far more time doing actual analysis rather than logistical cleanup or consolidation of data
- Our budget data pipeline process for reports went from a monthly manual process to a daily automated process
- Vena has set us up to be able to create multi-year budgets which would have been extremely tedious and we likely wouldn't have had the capacity to pursue if we had continued with our pre-Vena budgeting methods, which were focused just on annual planning
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 evaluated several products over a few years and were comparing everything to our existing Excel templates and manual processes. We didn't pull the trigger on any of the others because it didn't feel like it was worth the investment, both funding and organizational change, to adopt a platform that didn't provide us the flexibility and time saved, which we've found with Vena. Other systems were good, but not good enough to get us over the line to commit to purchasing and implementation. Vena demonstrated an ability to understand our needs, provide a flexible platform and partner with us rather than just sell us something.
Vena Feature Ratings
Vena Solutions Attributes
Using Vena
200 - Our users include a lot of Finance users, but also many non-Finance users, with representation from our executive leadership team, HR team, and our program/department managers. The Finance team shepherds others through planning processes and completing their templates, but the input is often done by those who's primary function is not finance related. With that said, adoption has been pretty smooth and those users have responded well to being able to own a portion of the budgeting process.
10 - We have 2 admin users who manage permissions and template updates, and then 8 FP&A team members that make some data model updates (adding new codes within a set structure), but who mostly spend their time supporting end users to login, check out files and complete their inputs. Support is heaviest during our annual planning cycle when the most simultaneous users are in the platform and there are clear deadlines to complete inputs, but there's always opportunities to orient new staff who are hired throughout the year.
- Grant Budgeting
- Operational Budgeting (flexible funding not tied to grants)
- Compensation Planning (related to summer performance cycles)
- We piloted a use case that collected mental health patient enrollment in Haiti, but ultimately did not fully implement because it strategically made more sense to build that into an Electronic Medical Record system - the goal was achieved though in demonstrating that Vena didn't have to be used just for Finance purposes
- Forecasting is our next big focus area so that end users can utilize prior period actuals to re-budget future periods within the same template
- We're considering expanding our user base to an even lower level to democratize the process budget input process more