BI for Excel Wizards
December 11, 2019

BI for Excel Wizards

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vena Solutions

Vena Solutions is being used as a business intelligence tool at our organization. Vena Solutions automates the production of dashboards, helps us post journal entries, and orchestrates the flow of data from source systems into our final 11-dimension cube. The tool is being used across the entire organization, but the majority of the company are consumers.
  • Vena Solutions does a great job of leveraging the power of Excel.
  • Vena Solutions integration developers are great (specifically, Patrick Gibbs).
  • Accessing Vena Solutions Excel templates requires a lot of clicking. This can deter some consumers from accessing their data.
  • Vena Solutions still needs to work on the build-out of their web-based dashboard offering. They market the product as Excel-based, so the fact that they have any web-based components could be considered a pro.
  • Vena Solutions has had an extremely positive impact on our business. We have successfully aggregated data from several different source systems into a single cube.
  • Vena Solutions has cut down on time to produce journal entries DRAMATICALLY.
Assuming a staff-member has excellent MS Excel skills, Vena Solutions is (most likely) capable of producing just about anything one can imagine. That said, Excel's visuals leave something to be desired. Most folks would choose a Tableau dashboard over a Vena dashboard any day. Furthermore, Tableau has some pretty amazing capabilities with regards to geographic heatmaps that I do not believe Vena Solutions can keep up with.
Vena Solutions is well-suited for a company with at least one analyst who has expert level Excel skills. It is worth noting that the expert does not need any VBA understanding; they need to be fairly adept working with the regular user interface. Vena is much less appropriate for any company that does not have an Excel wizard on staff.

Vena Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
8
Forecasting
8
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
9
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
10
Multi-currency management
Not Rated
Intercompany Eliminations
9
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
9
Detailed Audit Trails
10
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
10
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
Personalized dashboards
10
Color-coded scorecards
10
KPIs
10
Cost and profitability analysis
10
Key Performance Indicator setting
10
Benchmarking with external data
10
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
8
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
10
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
5
Predictive Analytics
8
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
5