If you can think it in Excel - Vena can make it happen!
November 20, 2015
If you can think it in Excel - Vena can make it happen!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vena Solutions
We currently use Vena Solutions for our budgeting process for 270 restaurants spread across 4 legal entities. We will begin rolling out reporting processes to executive and other end users soon, but are currently only using them inside our department.
- Vena Solutions is super flexible - if you can think it in Excel, you can make it happen in Vena.
- Having an online process and file management system is excellent for keeping everything together and organized. We have cut down the amount of emails back and forth tremendously.
- User acceptance has been extremely high as people are working in a tool they are familiar with.
- Support is very responsive and the company seems to truly care about the customer experience.
- As great as the tool is, there is very little "out-of-the-box" functionality - you and your consultant will have to build everything from scratch (We took an assisted implementation approach, so we did much more of the set up than some companies do from my understanding). The process is quick and helps you understand the product, but it takes a some thinking.
- The company is relatively small and a relatively new player in the market, so the user community and support forums are not very useful.
- The developers are constantly updating the product, but the company doesn't do a great job of communicating new features to the users.
- I would really like to see some more built in calculation features (spread methods and such) without having to build long excel formulas.
- We're still within the first round of budgeting with Vena Solutions, but so far it has increased efficiency by quite a bit just in not having two points of data calculation as we did with our previous software.
- When reporting is fully rolled out, it will be fantastic to have budgeting and reporting all in the same system. Just haven't had time to get there yet! We wanted to get comfortable with the tool in a contained budgeting process before rolling it out to reporting users.
We spent about a year and a half in the selection process for our budgeting system. The issue that we kept coming across was speed, flexibility, and a lack of understanding of our process during the sales cycle. Most of these other products wanted us to change our budgeting process to fit their system rather than solving for our individual needs. Vena Solutions’ sales team had worked with other products (many of those listed above) before making the switch to Vena and as such were able to explain the differences and understand the frustrations with the other products. During implementation, our consultant understood our rather complicated processes and calculations easily. This product is extremely flexible and very easy to use and we can't wait to see where it takes us!