Try imaging a finance department without Microsoft Excel. Finance really likes the spreadsheet solution from Microsoft and putting a full Performance Management solution for Planning and Budgeting behind it, that is what Vena Solutions has done.
A product that lowers the threshold in a finance and business environment. The limitation of Excel like version control, process management and central repository and database are amongst the numerous functions provided by Vena Solutions.
Enabling dynamic and instant planning, budgeting, forecasting and other Excel intense processes without losing data consistency. And this by sharing and reusing data, definitions and calculations eliminates redundancy, errors and duplication of effort.
That’s the unified cloud-based platform of Vena Solutions (www.venasolutions.com) ensuring consistency and data integrity for all business processes including, but not exclusively, planning, budgeting and forecasting. An application built with Vena Solutions is always cloud-based. When having tight project timescales for delivery, the application should be accessible at any time from any location. Vena focusses on the environment while you, as user, can focus on the project. In addition, IT support costs are reduced as well as maintenance costs of the IT infrastructure.
A typical budgeting process is managing a workflow of tasks like sales budget, capex budget, expense budget, profit and loss build up, balance sheet composition and reporting tasks. Vena simplifies collaboration by tracking information as it flows through your process, making it easy to monitor and report on the status of the plan while enabling users across the organization to participate. Workflow management within Vena helps reducing the overall planning cycle time and providing more accountability, ownership and control.
Vena provides efficient modeling capabilities in defining and maintaining hierarchies. Modeling can be bottom-up or top-down. The modeling engine allows complex calculations and ‘what-if’ scenarios to be an integral part of your planning process. The ability to model financial and non-financial outcomes as well as controling the business parameters and activities that ultimately drive those outcomes are one of the most important elements of an effective planning process. This is the basis for how the budget is viewed across different dimensions and how it will be aggregated. Allowing budget owners to keep track of the budget process by capturing who did what and when, is done via Vena’s audit trail. Going back and view prior points in time or roll back data and templates to compare them easily and answer questions like “Who did what and when?”. This enforces full accountability for the numbers.
Vena is integrated with Microsoft PowerPoint and Word. Your presentations and narrative reporting are updated by a simple refresh. Enhanced Power BI Integration leverages your Vena data even further with Power BI dashboards, turning data into insights in minutes by using business analytics tools. Power BI lets you develop and share dashboards easily through the cloud. Users can securely access information from any location, inputting and viewing data quickly and easily in real-time. Results are available dynamically via the web, Microsoft Excel, or on mobile devices.
The strengths of Vena
- Comprehensive process definition controls result in a reduction of the budget cycle, creates transparency in the figures and increases accountability
- Microsoft Excel input templates and reports provide a familiar tool with the benefits of control, standardization, consistency in calculations, formulas and methods
- Data integrity provides consistency in business decisions
- Easy to use model, hierarchy and attribute definition and maintenance
- Comprehensive scripting engine for calculating data
- Business Rule engine for financial consolidation functionality
- Business can respond quickly to a changing business environment and assess new opportunities
- Dashboards provide quick views for management, ease of use, analytics and insights
- Maintain, monitor, and control the cloud-based Vena platform without having to involve IT
- Audit trails enforce full accountability of the numbers, allowing budget owners to keep track of the budget process
- Grow together with your business by having an innovative, highly scalable and secure technology architecture
- Microsoft Word and PowerPoint integration
- Microsoft Power BI is embedded in the Vena platform
At the end of the day, aren’t we all still copy and pasting in Excel, or downloading yet another report from our reporting tool in our favorite spreadsheet solution where we can play with the numbers?
Vena lets you do that, while never disconnecting the data with your database.
One single version of the truth fully embedded in Excel templates for easy collaboration and processing.
Try this out during an interactive workshop where you can test-drive this all by yourself. Our ad-hoc Vena Interactive workshop is the ideal way to learn by yourself how Vena can bring value to your planning and reporting challenges. Start here.
element61 is a officially certified for Vena implementations and Vena Training. It received in 2023 the status of Advanced Partner, for the third consecutive year!
For more information contact us!