Easy to deploy
Updated October 16, 2020
Easy to deploy
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vena Solutions
Our business department heads are responsible for their budgets. So we are using this across the whole organization with our Corporate Accounting Department coordinating the activities with the administrators to execute the workflows. It resolves the issue of emailing and receiving back numerous Excel files and working tediously to be sure that everything is updated in the correct order.
- Uses Excel as the primary user interface.
- Allows business users to create templates and pull out the data easily.
- Provides some reporting about when tasks are late.
- Needs better reporting on the status of tasks.
- Should notify users when they have a past due task.
- Does not work well if you have too much data (intersection points).
- Hard to audit user security when you have 200+ users.
- Difficult to manage a large process with many activity blocks.
- We have user security to ensure that sensitive data stays in the hands of the business owners.
- We have tasks that the user has to submit (even if it is blank) to acknowledge that they have completed their review/input of data.
We had an issue that the original sales team underestimated the effort for our implementation causing a lot of trouble as we worked through the design phase. We had additional negotiation that was required after beginning the project. But the vendor's support team stayed engaged. There was also turnover on the vendor implementation team but handled that with ease.
We have not yet had the opportunity to expand our usage to daily decision making or various scenario analysis. We are using it for annual budgeting across the organization. They do provide the flexibility to assign data to a specific scenario to keep original budgets in tack and will be using that as time allows.
- OneStream XF, Adaptive Insights, a Workday company and Board
At the end of the day, Vena offered great value without having to involve IT. It was an easy to implement system for us. We could query the data from our financial system and created a process to send it to Vena using Box and Microsoft Power Automation (formerly Flow). Because of the extensive use of Excel and the primary end-user interface, it helped with the change management so that we did not have to do extensive training with the roll-out of the new process.
Vena Feature Ratings
Vena Solutions Attributes
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?
No
Did implementation of Vena go as expected?
No
Would you buy Vena again?
No
Using Vena Solutions
220 - We require our individual department heads to be responsible for their own budgets and to participate in filling out their assigned templates. Almost all users are only contributors. We have very few administrators. We have a few power uses that are allowed a view of the workflow to assist with monitoring the status but they are not allowed to make updates/changes to the process.
5 - We have 2 administrators who are responsible for managing the security and permissions for all 220 users. The administrators also are responsible for setting up the workflow and assigning the tasks. We have 3 template specialist that are responsible for managing the Excel templates. These three have more advanced Excel skills with formula usage and formatting. All 5 of us are able to manage the model and add dimension members when required.
- Budgeting at a detailed level
- The use of line item detail to describe what makes up the amount being budgeted
- The flexibility of managing our own templates and workflow
- Using Excel as the primary input method for our end users
Vena Solutions Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Quick Initial Response | None |