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Vena for Excel lovers
Updated November 26, 2020

Vena for Excel lovers

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vena

- Primarily use was planning with input from all departments, reviews and approvals by heads of departments, and consolidation and analyses by finance.
- Now used for monthly reporting with monthly distribution of financial reports to users, analysis of results by finance, preparation of presentations for internal and external purposes.
- Currently implementing a rolling forecast.
  • Flexibility and easy to use, mostly thanks to Excel.
  • Easy access for users to high level financial information and detailed transactions.
  • Planning functionalities (full budget and rolling forecast).
  • Workflows.
  • Integration with other software.
  • Technical glitches.

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?

No

Would you buy Vena again?

Yes

  • Monthly reporting became less time consuming.
  • Better forecasting accuracy (WiP).
  • Cost of licenses.
I was not directly involved in the sales process but it seems to have gone very smoothly.
The implementation was a bit more complicated as it seems Vena did not have enough resources to support their sales ramp-up at the time.
After that, I have had only great support experience, both with their help desk and with our account manager.
2 examples come to mind to illustrate the agility we gained with Vena:
- Thanks to the integration of Vena with our accounting software, users can now directly and independently access the accounting information on a daily basis, at the finest level of information (transactional), which both empowers them to pilot their areas of responsibility and free up some time for the financial team for value-added activities instead of extracting data.
- We also have implemented a rolling forecast process that we (Finance team or end users) can constantly update to provide the best estimate of our financials at any moment
We had Prophix (old version) for planning and budgeting and it was way less user-friendly and flexible than Vena.
We always had to go back to Excel to build more complex reports and share them.
And we extended the use of Vena to monthly reporting, which could not have been done with Prophix.
Well suited for teams with a strong knowledge of Excel and skills to admin a data base.
It is really well suited for an organization with a limited volume of data but I could see how the system would become slower and more difficult to manage for a company with many entities, large amount of transactions, etc.

Vena Feature Ratings

9.4
Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
10
7.5
Journal entries and reports
8
Detailed Audit Trails
7
9.3
Financial Statement Reporting
8
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
10
8.2
Personalized dashboards
9
Color-coded scorecards
9
KPIs
9
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
9
Benchmarking with external data
4
5.0
Excel data integration
8
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
2
8.5
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
9
9.0
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
9
Report sharing and collaboration
8
8.0
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
7.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
8.8
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Mobile Capabilities ()
Not Rated

Vena Solutions Attributes

The implementation process was difficult. They did not have the resources to roll-out the product on time so our team had to do most of the work that was supposed to be done by Vena.
However, now that we are up and running, the support desk provides very quick solutions to technical issues and our account manager has been great.
It is extremely easy to use the software right away because:
- it is Excel-based, so there is little to no learning curve for creating templates and reports
- the admin of the tool itself is very simple and intuitive (processes, workflows, etc)
The downside to that flexibility is the increased risk of human error, which can be mitigated by additional control and check files.

Using Vena

40 - Finance team
Program & department coordinators
Senior management
1 - 1 Senior financial analyst with advanced Excel expertise
  • Yearly budgets
  • Monthly reporting
  • Rolling Forecast
  • Rolling Forecast
  • Quarterly financial reviews
  • Staff cost allocations

Evaluating Vena and Competitors

Yes - It replaced old versions of:
Prophix (planning)
Management Reporter (reporting)
  • Advisor recommendation
  • Implementation support
The single most important factor was how user-friendly the software was, both for the finance team, and for the end users across the organization. Having an Excel-based solution was definitely a great selling point because I know (and the Vena team knows) that most financial analysts always revert to Excel to create and distribute complex reports.
No change

Vena Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
The training part of the implementation was outstanding. The consultant gave us a full tour of the Vena basic functionalities, helped us set up our universe, and showed us how to upload data into the Vena database. Right after this 2 day training, I was able to create all the templates i needed for my planning process, and get started with our reporting and budgeting processes.

Using Vena

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Familiar
None
  • Monthly reporting
  • Rolling Forecast
  • Integration with accounting system
  • Narrative input