Vena offers power, flexibility, approachability, and value.
Updated July 21, 2022
Vena offers power, flexibility, approachability, and value.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vena
We are using Vena across the entire organization for internal management reporting, monthly variance analysis, budgeting, reforecasting, project Pro-forma planning, and we are building three-year-plan capabilities now. We have separate models for attendance projection, personnel planning, Capex planning, and finally a financial model where it all rolls up, and where non-wage expenses are planned. The small FP&A team manages the platform, and we make everything as self-service as possible for end-users. It is our FP&A system for all but GAAP financial reports.
- Vena provides all the customizable flexibility and advanced calculation that you can squeeze out of Excel because Excel is used as the front-end. You can tailor the reporting and budget templates to your exact needs and leverage your existing Excel skills.
- Even though you work in Excel, the data is all controlled by a multi-dimensional cloud database. So your work is safe. Changes are auditable, and nobody has to rely on sharing Excel files between each other and tracking the latest version.
- Vena's workflow system can be extremely simple if that's what you need. Or you can build some fairly complex process flows for any task.
- While they are working hard to bring the Mac Excel experience up to parity with the Windows Excel experience, it's not there yet. Mac Excel templates can't leverage all the functions that Windows Excel templates can... Unless you're on the Microsoft 365 platform. The newest version of Vena works in Excel 365 and provides identical experience for PC and Mac end users. Administrators and template designers still have to use the legacy add-in for some features, but they are slowly being migrated to Vena 365.
- Integrations can be challenging to configure and update. Some rely on their own database language that is similar to SQL, but I don't know SQL. I work in Finance. Integrations are the area where I'm most likely to require support.
- Some of our complex reports run and refresh quite slowly. Especially those that are very multi-dimensional and configured dynamically.
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 reports can now be delivered to department directors within minutes of closing the books. Variance analysis comments are now saved in the system, with the reports, rather than in multiple Excel workbooks scattered across email and the file server.
- Our business-critical daily attendance model is now safely storing data in the cloud, and tracking changes from version to version is so much easier, as is building multiple projection scenarios.
- I was able the set up the Vena budget templates and deploy them to our end users faster than ever before, in the FIRST YEAR we were budgeting in Vena. Not playing traffic cop to files flying around in email has saved us a huge amount of time. And we didn't have to spend any time at all consolidating all the Excel inputs from all the managers. Vena handled all of that for us.
- Our three-year plans in the past were always top-down, with minimal input from other managers throughout the organization. So its utility for creating the seed for the next operating budget was extremely limited. Now we're able to create a three-year plan in coordination with other managers. We can distribute key inputs to them, and they can see the impact of their contribution, automatically increasing ownership. We aren't quite finished building this out, but the feedback so far has been very positive.
We demanded a lot from Vena after implementation, and they continued to work hard for us. Most notably, they helped us migrate to Vena 365 ahead of schedule so we could improve the Mac user experience.
The ability to evaluate new business opportunities is much improved, because we can take the models we would have built anyway and store the data in the cloud and run as many iterative scenarios as we want, without losing track of assumptions.
The integration with long-term demand/attendance assumptions can also automatically flow into other models that depend on those assumptions, keeping our analysis more consistent.
The integration with long-term demand/attendance assumptions can also automatically flow into other models that depend on those assumptions, keeping our analysis more consistent.
Prophix is powerful, and structures data on the back-end in a very similar way with multiple data models, and I have used it before. But the learning curve is steep. Building complex rules, e.g. for a union personnel model, was much harder than designing the same logic in Excel. The learning curve was steep and put off end-users, and even other Finance professionals. By working within Excel, Vena starts you higher up the learning curve. Adaptive is very user friendly, but the solution is much less flexible. One of my models uses a custom daily time hierarchy with day of week comparability across multiple years. In Vena, you can make a hierarchy however you like. That's not true in Adaptive. And security can only be applied along one dimension. With Vena, you can use task-binding to control access differently from one process to another. Host Analytics (now called Planful) was similar to Prophix in terms of power and maturity. It was more user friendly, but still didn't offer the combination of flexibility and approachability that Vena offers, and it was much more expensive.