Vena Solutions in Animation Accounting
January 16, 2017

Vena Solutions in Animation Accounting

George Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vena Solutions

We utilize Vena for both budgeting/tracking production expenses and managing our monthly financials. Consolidation of several dozen companies is a daunting task (one that we previously attempted only on an annual basis) but Vena enables us to carry out on a timely basis each month. This in turn gets more reliable data to senior management within a short enough time frame that it remains relevant to the current situation of the company.
We also use it to track employee costs in our technical and corporate departments, and currently have a long list of additional endeavors we want to use it to expand into for projections and project capacity management.
  • Monthly financials - Vena accurately ingests numeric totals which you can arrange through templates to quickly process financials in a consistent and timely manner. Through use of scenarios, we can use the same template and data to close out a period or calculate our tax return for the year.
  • Budgeting - The ability to calculate reams of data and move it between templates is hugely beneficial. We can version up, adjust a few line items in a template and then flow those changes back to production within minutes. This helps avoid different versions on separate machines or an employee leaving a file open and locking it for everyone else.
  • Cost reporting - By segmenting division costs in a periodic basis, we can give our managers a living snapshot of a production, allowing them to see the biweekly costs of each employee and budgeted line item.
  • Loading speed - the cloud may be the future, but our #1 user complaint is the time it takes to refresh and get to work.
  • Learning curve - a specialist is certainly recommended to setup and administer Vena, and my colleagues run all requests for changes through me rather than have the confidence and ease to dive it and fix things personally.
  • Tethered by plugin - many users find it cumbersome to use both a web login and configure an excel add-in just to access a report.
  • Faster financial reporting - Previously, consolidated reporting took place only annually or quarterly, with a significant time requirement. Now we perform a monthly consolidation within a few weeks of each month end.
  • Cost efficient cost reports - We do a biweekly cost report on each production which previously took someone a full day to perform and is now largely done automatically, freeing up time for our staff to do other work.
Vena is well suited to situations which can be linked to repeating sources such as specific accounts/divisions and financials. Any scenario where you want to combine dozens of numbers and then flow the results into another sheet and then compare across time is very useful, such as cash flows or expense reporting.

It becomes less advantageous when dealing with individuals, or trying to track their data across projects. Modifying templates over time and retaining backwards compatibility can become difficult as well, but that is more a matter of complexity than a failing of the application. Trying to combine entities with radically different charts of accounts would be more time consuming but not impossible.

Vena Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
Not Rated
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
9
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
10
Multi-currency management
8
Intercompany Eliminations
9
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
10
Detailed Audit Trails
7
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
8
Excel-based Reporting
9
Automated board and financial reporting
8
Personalized dashboards
8
Color-coded scorecards
Not Rated
KPIs
Not Rated
Cost and profitability analysis
8
Key Performance Indicator setting
Not Rated
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
Flat file integration
8
Excel data integration
9
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
7