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This blog was originally published on November 19, 2020 and updated on December 6, 2021. Whether you’re expanding headcount to win customers in new territories, transforming your operating model to win in an increasingly competitive marketplace, or adapting quickly in the face of uncertainty, one thing is for sure when it comes to driving business growth—you need a plan.  But no matter where your business is on its growth journey, the road ahead will never be easy when your planning process is hindered by obstacles like tedious manual processes, complex workflows, data silos, inaccurate data and, ultimately, the inability to enable agile, well-informed decision making. For strategic planning to really take root, you need cross-functional collaboration—from the office of finance to operations and beyond—and a complete view of business performance so your teams can do the data-driven analysis needed to move the business forward quickly and confidently. That’s why we created the Vena Growth Engine—to help businesses like yours connect departments, people, processes and systems to streamline and scale your plan to grow. In this blog post, we’ll break down the seven pillars that comprise Vena’s Growth Engine technology and show you how it can accelerate your plan to grow. Read on to discover: What is the Growth Engine? The seven pillars of Vena’s Growth Engine technology How to put the Growth Engine into action What Is Vena’s Growth Engine? Vena's Growth Engine is the power behind your business plans. Created by our team of experts, the Growth Engine combines best-in-class technology and methodology with the world’s leading grid, Excel, to drive Vena’s Complete Planning platform—making it the only planning and analysis solution robust enough for enterprise-level scalability, performance and extensibility, yet simple enough for anyone at any organization to use.  The Growth Engine inspires innovation, enables cross-functional collaboration and gives teams the freedom to analyze financial and non-financial data with intent. Built on the foundation of seven key technology pillars, the Growth Engine has everything you need to inspire confidence, champion teamwork and cultivate enthusiasm and innovation across your business as you plan to grow. The Growth Engine’s 7 Pillars A Central Cloud Database Integrations With Existing Source Systems A Native Excel Interface Modeling and Analysis Customizable Workflows Pre-Configured Solutions Security and Compliance Features These pillars all work in tandem to help you drive growth at scale. Keep on reading to learn a little bit more about each one. 1. A Central Cloud Database Data can be overwhelming sometimes, even for the world’s most experienced business leaders and finance professionals. Digging through old spreadsheets, triple-checking your numbers and building reports manually is tedious and error prone. Process automation, especially when it comes to data consolidation and reporting, is top of mind for finance teams today. It all starts with building a data warehouse in the cloud—and that’s exactly what Vena’s Growth Engine enables.   Vena makes it easy to analyze data. By viewing all of your data in Excel first, including imported data from external databases, you can work from a single source of truth for company-wide information and never have to worry about accuracy again. The OLAP cube data structure lets you slice and dice for summarized totals, while our relational database lets you query your numbers and drill down to transaction-level details.  Let’s say, for example, that you’re CFO of a women’s clothing company. As you plan for the upcoming quarter, you want to compare last month’s sales totals for sundresses in California versus Texas. Instead of searching your inbox for copies of itemized sales reports—and then running multiple VLOOKUPs to find the values you need—Vena would run the query for you and pull your numbers in a couple of clicks. Working from a central database is always more efficient as you chart your plan to grow. Think about this for a moment: What could you accomplish today if you had more time to focus on tomorrow? 2. Integrations With Existing Source Systems Vena’s 2020 Industry Benchmark Report revealed that 57% of finance teams are struggling with disparate data silos. Building a central database is the first step toward solving this problem, but you still need to ensure the right numbers flow in from your data sources, including your:  ERP or GL CRM HRIS or payroll software If all the data you need isn’t accessible in one system, it’s tough to track performance and make informed decisions on the fly. You’d also have to jump between financial (and non-financial) data sources to get a holistic view of your business, which might make it difficult to uncover the story your data is telling you. However, thanks to the Growth Engine’s seamless integration capabilities, Vena connects the dots and sets your data free. Our direct ETL engine and flat-file integrations can connect Vena with any source system—in the cloud or on premise—saving you the hassle of pulling out numbers manually. With company-wide planning data at the tips of everyone’s fingers, you’ll be able to tear down data silos and plan smarter with cross-functional stakeholders. And with everyone working from the same set of numbers, you’ll never have to worry about data accuracy again. Learn more about how Vena can keep your entire business connected. 3. A Native Excel Interface According to the 2020 Pulse of Performance Management survey, 82% of finance teams that already have planning software still use offline spreadsheets for core FP&A processes. This really isn’t surprising, because Excel is the universal language of business. It’s flexible and easy to use, but it gets clunky and hard to manage as your business needs grow—leading to version control issues, data integrity problems and time-consuming manual entries. If you’ve ever had a workbook crash when you’re racing to get month-end reports out, you understand why Excel alone isn’t meant to serve as a database. But what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you didn’t have to sacrifice the comfort of Excel to level-up your growth journey with the database functionality you need? Vena leverages an Excel grid interface, so you can use the tool you already know to do things you’ve only imagined. With the world’s leading grid inside of the world’s most complete planning platform, everyone at your organization can experience the joy of finance. Instead of forcing you to adapt your processes and learn a rigid, unfamiliar platform, Vena brings you the best of Excel—but without all of its usual pitfalls.   4. Modeling and Analysis The power of the Growth Engine really shines through when you model and analyze potential business scenarios with Vena. Interacting with your database from the comfort of Excel means you don’t have to flip between templates to see your budget, actuals, forecasts and unique models. Vena’s enterprise-level modeling engine lets you challenge your forecasts on-demand and confidently measure how specific variables—either internal or external—will affect your long-term outlook. All you have to do is input the assumptions you want to model so Vena can work its magic and apply them to your datasets in seconds. There’s also no limit to the models you can build in Vena because you’ll always be able to update them as your business drivers, revenue assumptions and reporting needs evolve. If you don’t have the flexibility to model new scenarios when you need to, it’s hard to adjust course when business conditions change. And if you aren’t always ready to answer “what if” quickly, it’s tough to stay on track and help leaders make data-driven decisions. That’s why scenario modeling is such an important part of our Growth Engine. Vena makes it simple to test best-case, worst-case or any scenario you can think of so you can better understand how today’s choices will impact tomorrow. 5. Customizable Workflows Is that board report approved yet? Has everyone submitted their budget entries? Is Joe almost finished with that variance analysis?  Finance leaders ask these questions a lot, but getting answers quickly isn’t always as simple as it sounds. Every organization’s planning process has a lot of moving parts and ensuring it all runs smoothly can be the difference between success and failure. Like you, we value teamwork and transparency here at Vena, and that’s why a visual workflow designer is baked into our Growth Engine. Instead of constantly chasing your colleagues down for progress updates, Vena makes it easy to: Assign tasks to teammates based on their specific role or department Track and audit the status of those tasks with real-time progress dashboards Formalize the review and approval process with managers Set up automated email reminders so nothing falls through the cracks Repeat, refine and build scalable workflow processes—because Vena grows right alongside you 6. Pre-Configured Solutions Rolling out a planning platform isn’t easy, but the Growth Engine makes it easier with pre-configured solutions. You’ll always be able to customize Vena to meet the specific needs of your business—and even use your existing Excel templates, if you wish—but you don’t have to build it all yourself. You’ve got enough on your plate already, and the last thing you need is for your implementation to take longer than it needs to. Pre-configured solutions accelerate your time-to-value. They include purpose-built templates and data models, pre-defined business logic and source system connectors to meet your industry-specific business requirements. 7. Security and Compliance At Vena, we will never stray from our commitment to keeping your data safe, and we’re not just talking about network security and encryptions here. Our platform is still supported by best-in-class data security, but the Growth Engine takes it further with complete auditability, user-level security permissions and transparency and control over your data, completely integrated with the Vena and Excel interface. Let’s say, for example, that you’re rolling out a bottom-up budgeting process and you want your regional department heads to take ownership of the numbers they’re responsible for. With Vena, you can apply user-based security permissions to individual cells in your template so contributors can only alter the values relevant to them. And if there’s sensitive data you don’t want certain employees to see—such as salary information, for example—you can restrict access by removing those cells from their view. With Vena, only the right people have access to the right data. Other security features include: Audit trails: So you can track and verify any changes made to your templates Validation rules: To prevent data entries above or below certain thresholds Check out this datasheet to learn more about Vena’s advanced security features. How To Put the Growth Engine Into Action With the Growth Engine’s seven technology pillars behind you, you’ll always be prepared to take on the future with confidence. But in order to accelerate your growth journey and make the most of our platform, you need to understand what your goals are so we can work with you to achieve them. If budgeting and forecasting are slowing you down, Vena Finance-Led Planning will help automate manual processes and drive efficiency across your business. If you want to dive deeper into your data and support workforce planning, revenue planning, capital expenditures and more, our Extended Planning use cases can open those doors for you. You can even look Beyond Planning and streamline consolidations, account reconciliations and financial close with Vena. No matter where you are on your growth journey, Vena’s Complete Planning solution is always here to help. The possibilities with us are endless, but it’s our Growth Engine that provides all the power. We’ll help you excite your teammates, simplify your processes and take finance-led growth to a whole new-level—because that’s what the Growth Engine is all about.   Preview Vena today and transform your growth journey with us.

Workforce planning means something different to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO, founder or HR professional; you’re sure to have your own take. Let’s start with a basic definition of workplace planning: Workforce planning is the process of analyzing your workforce and forecasting and planning for your business’s current and future needs. It helps your organization stay on track with its goals by ensuring you have the right people in place to accomplish those objectives—and that the people you do employ are equipped with the skills your business needs. That sounds complex and the fact of the matter is that it can be. But in many ways, it all boils down to answering these questions: Is your workforce positioned to meet both current and future business goals? What skills do your employees need to meet these goals? Do you lack talent in any key areas? What’s the best way to acquire new talent? Should you hire full time? Fill in with contractors as necessary? What’s the ongoing cost of maintaining the workforce you need to succeed? Do you have a system for tracking key data and metrics? (No, pen and paper don’t count!) You may have a basic understanding of how to answer these questions, but it’s imperative to dig deeper. That’s where workforce planning reports come into play. While there’s no shortage of workforce planning and human resources reports you can run, these five are among the most important (and common). 1. Headcount Report Turnover and retention are two words you can never escape as a CEO, business owner or HR professional. They’re always on your mind. A headcount report is a type of human resources report that provides clarity in regards to how many employees you have, how often they come and go, which departments are struggling with turnover and which ones have a strong retention plan in place. On average, it costs employers $4,129 to hire a new employee. And that doesn’t even take into consideration training expenses.  Running a headcount report once a month or once a quarter allows you to address any concerns while pinpointing areas of progress and success.  2. Compensation Report  It doesn’t matter if you have a handful of employees or 1,000+; a compensation report can help you answer questions such as: How much money is paid every month in salary and benefits? How much money is paid out in overtime? Who is receiving incentives, such as bonuses and commission? Where do you stand in regards to payroll deductions? Are employees using paid leave? At what time of the year is it most common? Running a business isn’t all about money, but there’s no business if there’s no revenue. Compensation reporting is a must.  3. Performance Report It’s not good enough to hire employees and hope for the best. You need to closely track performance to ensure that every employee is performing at their peak. A performance report allows you to answer critical questions, including: Which employees are meeting their objectives? Which employees are falling short? Which departments are reaching goals on time, without going over budget?   How have employees been graded in performance reviews over a specific period of time?  Which employees show the most potential for advancement? Which members of management are successfully growing the talent on their team?  With regular performance reports, you can easily identify top performers, average performers and those who have work to do. This can help make critical decisions regarding hiring and firing.  4. Recruiting Report  Successful recruiting can be the difference between success and failure. Your goal is to hire and retain top talent, but you can’t assume this is happening. You need to have a firm grasp of your recruiting efforts. Recruiting reports can help manage details such as: Number of open and recently filled positions The number of applications and interviews by position The average time to hire a new employee The average cost of hiring a new employee The current stage of the recruiting process Without regular recruiting reports, you could face challenges such as: Overlooking qualified candidates Overspending Neglecting important parts of the process, such as completing background checks You could be hiring one employee or 100+. The number doesn’t matter. What matters is that you consistently run recruiting reports that keep you up to date on the process.  5. Variance Analysis Reports The business you’re running today won’t be the same one you’re running tomorrow. And the company you’re running tomorrow will be different from the one you’re managing a year from now. This is where variance analysis reports come into play.  With this kind of report, you can create accurate forecasts using calculations for salaries, benefits, bonuses, taxes and various expenses.  As you run the numbers, compare them to forecast variances for a better feel of how the future will unfold. Tip: Vena allows you to automate variance analysis, keeping you up to date while saving you time.  Final Thoughts You can run all of these workforce planning reports and human resources reports, among others, with the help of Vena. It’s better to rely on technology than to manually run reports as this helps protect against errors while saving you time.  From employee-level planning to HRIS data integration, it won’t take long to realize that workforce planning doesn’t have to boggle your mind and take up all of your days (and half of your weekend). Lean on the collaborative and intuitive workforce planning software from Vena to show you the way. 

Here at Vena, we’re always working on creating the best version of our product. That’s why this month, you can look forward to using our new modeler wizard feature. Read on to discover three ways our new modeler wizard can help make your finance and operations planning so much easier.  1. Learn Best Practices for Business Data Modeling With our new modeler wizard, you can learn the best practices for data models. You can use a standard data model template based on our own expert recommendations, or you can customize and build your data model yourself. With Vena’s recommended model, you have eight standard dimensions that are included as part of Vena best practices. Each standard dimension includes a pre-built hierarchy. You can edit the name associated with each dimension and add additional dimensions as well. Once you save your model, you will be redirected to the Vena data model list which will automatically refresh to show your new data model. 2. Full Customization Is Still Possible Sometimes you know what you want when it comes to building out your models. That’s why our modeler wizard allows you to fully customize your own models with our “configure your own model” tool.  While the wizard functions as a starting point, with the standard dimensions being based on industry best practices, users can still add their own dimensions, as needed. This feature is available in both the standard model and the "build your own" model option.  You can add your own dimensions by selecting the Add Dimension button and selecting from the drop-down list. You can choose from standard dimensions or create your own by selecting the Add new option at the bottom of the drop-down.   3. A More Formalized and Guided Process of Creating a Data Model When you are building out a new business model, following modeling best practices is key to helping you develop the best version of your business model. Vena provides a guided solution that takes you through a series of steps to build your model. For example, Vena provides naming conventions for modeler data and also provides eight standard dimensions within the recommended model.  Learn more about Vena Get ready to start your own growth journey.

When you’re building out or updating your company’s annual budget, getting feedback from cross-functional stakeholders is a crucial part of the process. Regardless of whether your finance team uses a top-down or bottom-up approach, non-finance contributors will always have to make their own budget inputs.  Vena 365 Connect makes budget inputs a lot easier thanks to a refreshed user interface for contributors from across your business. We’ve improved Vena’s usability so you can collaborate with every department and deliver more reliable budgets—all without the manual effort. In this article, we’ll walk you through the new contributor and manager experiences in Vena 365 Connect. But first, let’s make it clear what Vena 365 Connect actually is, with some context regarding why we even launched these updates in the first place. 1 What is Vena 365 Connect? 2 Why did we launch Vena 365 Connect? 3 How Vena 365 Connect makes budgeting easier for cross-functional contributors 4 How Vena 365 Connect makes creating budget inputs easier for managers What Is Vena 365 Connect? Vena 365 Connect is a Complete Planning platform that brings business data from across your organization into a secure, cloud-based environment. It’s an even more user-friendly version of Vena that integrates with Microsoft 365, which means Excel users on both Windows and Mac can create reports and distribute budgeting templates seamlessly. Why Did We Launch Vena 365 Connect? We launched Vena 365 Connect for two primary reasons: To ensure Mac users aren’t limited in their use of our solution.   To provide a seamless, modern, fully integrated and user-friendly experience across all planning processes. If you’re an existing Vena customer, you already know that our platform leverages a native Excel interface. But you also know cross-functional budget contributors may not be as Excel-savvy as you are—so that’s why we’ve updated the experience with a simpler, more user-friendly interface. Learn more below! How Vena 365 Connect Makes Budgeting Easier For Cross-Functional Contributors In addition to the new Mac compatibility, the most noteworthy feature of Vena 365 Connect is a slick new sidebar contributors can see when they work on a template. Contributors have the option to minimize this sidebar to maximize screen space when entering and analyzing data. Let’s say, for example, that you’re a marketing manager updating your advertising budget. This is what you would see when you open the OpEx template for your marketing department in Vena:   The sidebar is divided into three distinct tabs: 1 Instructions and Documents 2 Data Input Tools 3 Data Analysis Tools Each of these sections provides a simplified set of functions your contributors can take advantage of as they prepare their budgets for review and approval. Keep on reading for a full breakdown of each one. 1. Instructions and Documents Make It Clear What Contributors Need To Work On As you open up your marketing department’s OpEx template, everything you need to do is laid out clearly in the Instructions and Documents section. Admins can make the instructions as simple or as detailed as they need to, but they’ll always be displayed here to avoid any confusion for contributors. This is what you would see when you look at the Instructions and Documents tab in the marketing OpEx template:   As you can see, the marketing manager needs to submit all their budget inputs for review and approval. Let’s have a look at what that looks like with Vena 365 Connect. 2. Data Input Tools Make Adjusting Line Item Details Simple When you open up the Data Input Tools tab, you’ll have the option to add or remove line item details from your budgeted values. So if you need to make a distinction between print and digital spends in your total advertising budget, all it takes is a couple of quick clicks.   Once you’ve saved those inputs back to Vena, the new numbers will be applied across your dataset automatically—ultimately sparing you the hassle of copying and pasting those values yourself. Admins will then be prompted to review your work before it’s finalized.  3. Data Analysis Tools Tell the Full Story Behind Each Number Once your contributors have submitted their budgets for final review, managers can use Vena’s Data Analysis Tools to uncover the story those numbers are telling them. Let’s say you see a particularly large value somewhere and you need to know where it came from. The Drill Saves function brings up a history of all changes to that data intersection so you can see exactly who made the input and when—giving you 100% visibility into everything that’s happening with your numbers.   You can also see the individual transactions that roll up to any value with the Drill Transactions function in Vena 365 Connect. The data you’d see here depends on the hierarchy structure in your data model, but all member values would be displayed in a separate Excel tab.  This is really helpful for explaining discrepancies or variances to your management team, because all the context you’d need is available with the touch of a button. And when you always have reliable data at your fingertips whenever you need it, you’ll always be well-equipped to lead your business in the right direction. How Vena 365 Connect Makes Creating Budget Inputs Easier for Managers 1. Budgets, Forecasts and Reports Built In Seconds If you need to create a template or report quickly from scratch, the Quick Build feature lets you pull data from your cube—in seconds—through a simple drag-and-drop interface. You can save and share this as a real-time budget, forecast or report that updates automatically based on data in your cube. 2. Faster, Intuitive, Automatic Mapping If you have a pre-existing Excel template you want to connect to Vena’s Complete Planning platform, the Auto-Map feature makes transferring templates easier and faster than ever. Select the cells you want to map and the mapping type and the Auto-Map feature will automatically match your source field to your destination field. 3. Easier, Quicker Troubleshooting Once you’re satisfied with your template or report, the Analyze feature checks for mapping errors. If any numbers appear incorrect, you can use the Cell Info feature to view every specific mapping for a cell to ensure it’s been mapped correctly—saving you time to focus on what really matter—insights and analysis.   Experience Vena 365 Connect in Action Vena 365 Connect is now available to everyone—but only if your team is already using Microsoft 365. To learn more about our platform and to see Vena 365 Connect in action, just check out the link below and take it for a spin yourself! (Current Vena customers can click here to ask your CSM for more info.) Ready to start your own growth journey?

As we all continue to navigate today’s ever-changing business environment, finance teams everywhere are doubling down on scenario analysis. Now more than ever, addressing those “what-if” questions and preparing your business in advance for any number of potential scenarios is one of your finance team’s biggest priorities. After all, as this Deloitte report points out, “Stakeholder expectations for information and insights will increase dramatically” by 2025. Monthly or quarterly forecasting cycles just won’t be enough for finance teams because you’ll need to know immediately how today’s business decisions will impact tomorrow. “Finance goes real time,” the report proclaims—and that’s why what-if analysis is so important to embrace. Agile scenario modeling is easier said than done, though, especially if you’re wrestling with spreadsheets and aggregating data from multiple source systems. Vena’s Complete Planning platform makes scenario modeling simple by integrating all your data sources into one central planning hub—and now it’s even easier to adjust your data models in response to change. Our Spring ‘21 Product Release features a refreshed Modeler UI, which includes several usability improvements and tweaks to the modeler’s look and feel. Read on to discover how Vena’s New Modeler can help you perform quick, thorough and reliable what-if analysis—and ultimately give you the confidence to prepare your business for anything. 1 A simplified layout 2 More detailed data controls 3 Easier attribute management A Simplified Layout for Managing Multiple Data Models Modeler Landing Page The most obvious difference between the old modeler and the new one is a simpler, more user-friendly interface. We’ve added a new landing page where you can view all of your models in list format, instead of having to select them from a crowded drop-down menu. This makes it easy to switch quickly between the models you’re working on and to add new data models when your business requirements change.  New Modeler Landing Page Redesigned Members Page Once you’ve selected a data model to work on, the redesigned Members layout displays all your modeling dimensions across the top of the page. This can help you determine which specific dimensions (account, entity, product line, etc.) are contributing to the results in your data model. You can also move quickly between dimensions and add members, remove members or edit your member hierarchy on demand. This would be particularly useful if you’re gauging the profitability of a new warehouse, for example, or if your company is restructuring and you need to merge multiple business units.  New Members Page You’ll Have More Control Over Your Models With Bulk Member Movements, Saved Versioning, Data Previews and Revisions Tracking Responding to change quickly and tweaking your models on the fly is a crucial piece of the puzzle when you’re analyzing potential business scenarios. That’s why Vena’s New Modeler was wired for “self-service” flexibility and speed—because your finance team needs the freedom to assess your business decisions from every angle. Bulk Member Movements In Vena’s old modeling environment, moving individual data points within your dimensions had to be done one by one. But today, with the new Bulk Member Movement feature, you can move multiple members at once and restructure your data models instantly. This is especially helpful if you have new data points coming in through an ERP integration—or if you want to start experimenting with a new organizational structure and roll-up reporting hierarchy. New Bulk Member Movement Feature Saved Versioning Vena’s advanced versioning tool is the backbone of our scenario modeling functionality. With the New Modeler experience, we’ve updated the versioning tool with two major enhancements: 1) A save button and 2) a much simpler interface for selecting the dimensions to include in your analysis.  Let’s say, for example, that you want to use this year’s actuals as the starting point for next year’s budget model—and then experiment with three different spending scenarios to chart the best path forward for your business. Instead of creating those three different budget scenarios from scratch, you could just copy your budget automatically into three versions with different names before adjusting the inputs and dimension filters. You wouldn’t even have to run the scenarios in order to save them to the Vena database, which makes it easier to stay organized and keep track of your potential outcomes. New Saved Versioning Tool Improved Data Preview Window In Vena’s world, data points that are defined by multiple dimensions in your data model are called “intersections.” Our modeler has always allowed you to preview your data before versioning scenarios, but the New Modeler experience has made the preview window a lot cleaner. Now you’ll see an organized table that returns more detailed results—ultimately making it simple to ensure your data model is properly configured.   New Data Preview Window Detailed Revisions Tracking Much like the versioning tool, Vena’s audit trail functionality is an essential aspect of our Modeler. In order to make sure your scenarios are always reliable and accurate, you need to be able to track when your teammates go in and make changes. That way, as an administrator, you’ll be able to vet those revisions yourself before sharing your data models with decisions makers. It’ll also help you weed out mistakes and maintain 100% confidence in your numbers—even as your what-if analysis efforts get more complicated as your business evolves. The old modeler featured a drop down menu where revisions were listed in order. We’ve replaced that with a detailed table view so you can see exactly what was changed in your data model, when the change was applied, and by whom. New Revisions Tracking Window Easier Attribute Management for More Clearly Defined Dimensions Categorizing the various members in your dimensional hierarchy with attributes (such as currency, product categories, reporting package, etc.) will help keep your data models clean. With Vena’s New Modeler, you don’t have to look very far to identify relationships between data points—because instead of forcing you to manage all your attributes from a separate tab, you can now add, remove, edit and search for attributes from the Members Page. Attribute filters will also help you build alternate views of your data model so you can uncover hidden insights when testing assumptions and modeling scenarios. New Attribute Management Experience See Vena's New Modeler in Action  As of April 13th, 2021, current Vena customers can enable the New Modeler from their Vena tenant. You can also click the link below for an interactive walkthrough of the new functionality. It’s important to keep in mind that no matter where you are on your finance team’s growth journey, the need for agile scenario analysis is only going to increase. Finding the right solutions to make the job easier is crucial—because you can’t make decisions today without assessing their impact on tomorrow. Ready to start your own growth journey?

Have you ever started working on an important financial model and thought, “I’m just gonna do this all in Excel.” If the answer is yes, you’re definitely not alone—and that’s because Excel is the universal language of business. Even after more than three decades on the market, Microsoft’s iconic spreadsheet program remains the #1 choice for finance, operations and executive teams everywhere due to its flexibility, familiarity and superior ease of use. But when you start using Excel to scale your key planning processes—such as budgeting, forecasting, reporting and ad hoc analysis—that’s when things get a little more complicated.  Excel is a powerful tool, but it’s not designed to function like a comprehensive business planning application. Version control problems, data integrity issues and tedious manual aggregations will really slow you down if you’re wrangling dozens of workbooks via email. As your business continues to grow, you’re going to need a solution to help you plan efficiently, confidently and in collaboration with cross-functional teammates. You probably won’t want to abandon everything you love about Excel though—and that’s how Vena can help. Vena is the only Complete Planning platform that marries enterprise-class functionality with the comfort and flexibility of Excel. Our Growth Engine technology features a native Excel interface, so you can use the tool you already know to do things you’ve only imagined. Instead of reverting back to spreadsheets outside of an existing planning tool—which according to BPM Partners is something 82% of finance teams do today—Vena gives you the best of both worlds.  Curious to know how it works? Here are three ways Vena makes business planning better with Excel: 1 Mapping Excel Workbooks To a Centralized Database 2 Detailed Analysis in Excel 3 Purpose-Built Templates Mapping Your Excel Workbooks To a Centralized Cloud Database There are times during a planning cycle when business requirements change, forcing you to adjust your numbers on the fly and work with new assumptions. Let’s say, for example, that you’re in the middle of budget approval season and your company wins a big deal that wasn’t expected for another year. Now you’ve got to increase operating costs to service this spike in demand—and update the squeaky-clean budget you’d just worked so hard to finalize. In that situation, here’s what you’d need to do if all your processes lived in Excel: Open up your department budgets and manually key in the changes to specific operational line items (headcount budget, materials cost, etc.).   Copy and paste the new figures into your balance sheet and income statement, then update your cash flow statement accordingly (ouch!).   Ensure your budgeted numbers reflect the new updates by triple-checking your inputs and re-confirming your calculations.   Email the updated workbooks to stakeholders across the business and secure executive approval all over again. This could take days or even weeks depending on the size of your business. And with multiple versions of the same workbook floating around, it’s tough to make sure your teammates are working from the same set of numbers. By the time you’ve sorted it out, there might be even more budget updates on your plate—making it difficult to pivot quickly and keep your business on track for success. Vena solves this problem by providing one central planning database that maintains data integrity between all your unique budget templates. Dynamic mappings back to Excel ensure that as soon as a cell is updated, those changes are applied automatically across your entire dataset. Now, instead of constantly wondering which version of your budget is accurate, stakeholders can rest easy knowing that Vena is their one source of truth. Let’s take another look at the same example from above. Here’s what the process would look like with Vena: You adjust the line item details in your department budgets in Excel.   Vena goes to work on the back end. Dynamic mappings ensure that your cash flow statement, balance sheet, income statement and corresponding budgets are updated and aggregated automatically based on your new inputs.   Stakeholders and administrators are notified of the changes instantly, then prompted to review and approve. Audit trail functionality allows them to see exactly who changed what, complete with additional comments regarding why the changes were made.  By eliminating the need for tedious manual data inputs, Vena frees up time for you to look toward the future of your business. Think about this for a second: What could you achieve today if you had more time to focus on tomorrow? Vena Customer Story Less Inputting, More Analyzing YES Communities slashed budgeting times by 50% with Vena. Now the firm's managers make smarter, more strategic business decisions. Detailed Analysis Right in the Excel Interface If you’ve ever looked at a revenue forecast and wondered why you landed on that number, you might’ve opened Salesforce, your ERP and an offline Excel model to better understand the details. This highlights another common issue with business planning in Excel alone—it’s great for organizing financial information, but it’s hard to provide the right context when you’re drawing from multiple data sources. Vena connects the dots thanks to seamless integrations with your source systems, including your ERP or GL, CRM, HRIS and more. You don’t have to juggle Excel with your data sources to find the detailed numbers you’re looking for because Vena pulls them in for you and presents them right in your spreadsheets. Excel’s existing analysis functions stay the same as you’ve always known, but now you can just click on a number and use Vena’s drill down tool to see account-level inputs—adding a new dimension of detail to any report you can imagine.    With that kind of power at your fingertips, you’ll be able to: Perform quick, easy analysis of financial and operational metrics   Proactively identify opportunities for cost savings or strategic investments   Ensure transparency across departments and hold budget owners accountable to their numbers   Help management understand how you landed on your reported totals—ultimately allowing them to make informed, data-driven business decisions  This will also help you keep Excel a lot cleaner and easier to navigate. So, if you’re copying and pasting from source systems and struggling with 100-tab workbooks, Vena might be what you need to make your planning process a little less stressful. Vena's Complete Planning solution gives you one source of truth for your data, but doesn't force you out of Excel. Learn more here. Purpose-Built Excel Templates, Plus the Freedom To Customize Your Own Ask any finance leader who’s ever implemented a planning solution and they’ll tell you that usability should be one of the most important factors in your vendor choice. There are plenty of great solutions out there, but they can often be rigid, clunky and difficult to adopt across the business. If your teams are working in Excel and uploading files to a planning solution afterward, ask yourself: Are you really making the most of the tool you spent months rolling out? With Vena’s Excel interface, you don’t have to force your teams to learn an unfamiliar platform. This will maximize adoption across the business, greatly reduce the learning curve and accelerate your time-to-value. Plus, everything you’ve already mastered in Excel—such as graphing, charting, formulas, shortcuts and more—doesn’t have to change when you make the move to our solution. You can even map your existing workbooks right to our central database and leverage Excel’s flexibility to build new templates and use cases on your own.  Alternatively, if you’re looking for a little more guidance, you can also take advantage of our purpose-built templates and solution configurations, which cover a range of business planning processes from FP&A to financial close management. Check out this table below to learn a little bit more about the endless possibilities with Excel and the power of Vena. Solution Configuration Use Cases Finance-Led Planning Budgeting, Forecasting, What-If Analysis, Financial Reporting, Management Reporting, Dashboards Extended Planning Cash Flow Modeling, Workforce Planning, CapEx Planning, Sales and Revenue Planning Beyond Planning Financial Close Management, Consolidations, Account Reconciliation, Tax Provisioning, Incentive Compensation Management, Project Management Excel at More With Vena As we all lead our businesses through this era of finance transformation, there’s one thing we know for certain: Excel is here to stay. So instead of looking to replace a tool you’ll probably just fall back to anyway, it’s time to think about ways you can embrace your Excel expertise with Vena. Automated aggregations. Analysis right in Excel. Purpose-built planning templates and the flexibility to customize your processes. No matter how you choose to approach your company’s unique growth journey, you’ll always be well-equipped with a scalable solution that’s naturally comfortable.  June 14-18, 2021 Join Us For Vena Nation Week! Learn how Excel and Vena can help you supercharge your data. Join us for our session Supercharge Your Data With Vena and Microsoft on June 18th from June 18, 12:30 PM EDT.

Advisory firm Gartner will no longer publish a Magic Quadrant vendor comparison for cloud FP&A solutions. Instead, the annual report will be replaced with a new Market Guide, the first of which is scheduled for release in February 2022. Both Magic Quadrants and Market Guides provide valuable insight for software buyers, but it’s important to understand the key differences between them. Magic Quadrants categorize vendors and assess their strengths and weaknesses, while Market Guides offer an overview of the state of the market itself. In other words, Magic Quadrants help you figure out what you should buy, whereas Market Guides tell you why you should invest in a solution. Also, as Gartner notes, Market Guides are introduced “when a market matures to the point that the offerings become fairly interchangeable.” Gartner’s analysts believe the cloud FP&A market has reached that level.  However, even though some vendors are offering similar solutions, there are still important differences separating the very best from the rest of the pack. You need to be able to recognize these differences as you explore the cloud FP&A market, because you can’t drive your growth journey with a tool that doesn’t meet all your needs. Here’s what you need to know: Vena Is the Only Solution With a Native Excel Interface According to a recent survey from BPM Partners, usability is what drives success with FP&A software solutions. Excel is the preferred language for finance professionals. That’s why Vena leverages Excel as the interface to our Growth Engine—it’s universal and easy-to-use. With Vena, you can use the tool you already know to do things you’ve only imagined. Think of it this way: Excel is an awesome tool, but it’s not built to function like a comprehensive business planning application. Planning with offline spreadsheets can lead to version control issues, data integrity problems and countless hours wasted on tedious manual aggregations. Even still, 82% of companies with FP&A software keep using Excel anyway—another key finding from that same BPM survey. That means solutions promising to replace Excel must leave something to be desired. After all, Excel is the world’s best grid. But while it is familiar and flexible, all the manual work required to keep templates clean can be a burden. That’s where Vena comes in.    Instead of forcing your teammates to learn a rigid, unfamiliar interface, Vena leverages the flexibility of Excel to give you the freedom to work the way you think. Everything you love about Excel spreadsheets stays exactly the same with Vena, but it’s amplified by the power and scalability of the Vena Growth Engine—our technology and methodology that powers your plan to grow—along with enterprise-class capabilities, including: The ability to map your Excel workbooks to a central cloud database   Detailed data analysis right in the Excel interface, using Excel’s inherent BI tools (Excel Ideas)    Visual workflow tools, audit trails and data validation measures   Purpose-built Excel templates, plus the freedom to customize your own   If your teammates can use Excel, they already know how to use Vena. Here are some examples of how Vena’s ease-of-use can accelerate your growth journey: Maximum user adoption across every function of your business   A significantly shorter learning curve compared to other cloud FP&A solutions   Faster time-to-value both during and after your implementation   If there’s anything finance teams can be certain about these days, it’s that Excel is not going anywhere. And Vena takes Excel even further with our Complete Planning platform—you really won’t find that with any other solution on the market.   Vena Drives Complete Planning (Not Just FP&A) If you’re looking to streamline and scale your core FP&A processes—such as budgeting, forecasting, reporting and ad hoc analysis—Vena can help your finance team plan faster, smarter and with consistently reliable numbers. But what about when you need to extend FP&A past the finance team and serve as a more strategic partner to your business? How will you effectively engage cross-functional stakeholders, simplify your analysis and unify business planning with one source of truth for your data? That’s where the power of our Growth Engine really shines. Vena brings your people, departments, processes and systems into a secure, single-source cloud solution so you can grow anywhere together. Vena powers any plan you can create in Excel. It’s the only Complete Planning solution with configurations for FP&A, Extended Planning and Beyond. Instead of forcing you to operate in silos—which makes it tough to empower decision makers with a holistic view of the business—Vena makes it easy to work collaboratively, align objectives and drive tangible results across your business. Here’s how we do it:     A native Excel interface for flexibility, comfort and easier adoption across departments (see above)   Advanced automations so you can spend more time on analysis, instead of spending hours on tedious manual data entries   Workflows, audit trails and data validation measures to help you better manage your processes with 100% trust in your numbers   Seamless integrations with your existing source systems—including your ERP/GL, CRM, HRIS and more—to create one central database for all cross-functional data  With that kind of power behind you, you can apply your agile FP&A framework to operations, HR, sales planning and more. This is critical, because as Gartner predicted in the 2020 (and final) edition of the cloud FP&A Magic Quadrant, 70% of FP&A projects will have an xP&A focus by 2024. So instead of evaluating vendors based on the benefits for just your finance team, ask yourself: How will this solution help me better serve the business as a whole?  You can also check out this table for a breakdown of our Complete Planning platform. No matter where you are on your growth journey, Vena has a configuration to help take your business to a whole new level. Solution Configuration Use Cases Vena for Finance-Led Planning Budgeting, Forecasting, What-If Analysis, Financial Reporting, Management Reporting, Dashboards Vena for Extended Planning Cash Flow Modeling, Workforce Planning, CapEx Planning, Sales and Revenue Planning Vena for Beyond Planning Financial Close Management, Consolidations, Account Reconciliation, Tax Provisioning, Incentive Compensation Management, Project Management Vena Has No Limits As we mentioned earlier in this article, Gartner’s move to the cloud FP&A Market Guide suggests solution capabilities aren’t the only things setting vendors apart anymore—it’s also the market segments, industries and verticals they’re equipped to serve. Vena’s flexibility, scalability and ease of use with Excel means Complete Planning with Vena is a truly limitless experience. The platform is fully customizable and can be applied across any number of industries and use cases, from mid-market leaders to multinational corporations. We also offer pre-configured solutions made up of templates, data models, connectors and business logic customized to meet specific business and industry requirements. That means Vena is as flexible or as prescriptive as you need it to be. Every organization has different priorities for planning improvements, so it’s important to understand exactly what you’re trying to improve—and why—before you hit the market for a solution. Consider these examples: Net interest income planning for banks and credit unions   ARR planning and customer health dashboards for SaaS companies   Loss ratio and cost per claim analysis for insurance firms   Production planning in manufacturing   Enrollment planning in higher education   Labour management for healthcare providers   If you don’t evaluate your business objectives and approach the market with a clear vision, it gets harder to focus your resources and keep your project on track for success. Vena can always be there for you as a dedicated partner in your growth journey—but you need to know what you’re looking for so we can steer that journey as a team. Looking Ahead To the Market Guide for Cloud FP&A Solutions Gartner’s upcoming Market Guide will teach you how the market for solutions is maturing, how the FP&A function is evolving and why businesses like yours are focusing on process optimization. However, it’s important to understand that the cloud FP&A market doesn’t lack differentiation because Vena is the only Complete Planning solution that leverages the flexibility of Excel. Other vendors might be similar, but nothing is quite like Vena—Vena empowers you to work the way you think.  Ready to start your own growth journey?

Data is an important asset for businesses, but if you’re not making the most of it, how is it powering your plan to grow? Data is the central element that connects people, processes and technology. As your business scales, so will your data. That’s why putting it to work is critical for helping you drive more informed decisions, unlocking potential business opportunities, building resilience and fostering growth within every level of your organization. Taking full advantage of your data means being empowered to get the most value from it and this is where Vena’s Extended Planning solutions can help supercharge your data’s potential. Powered by our Growth Engine technology, Vena’s Extended Planning solutions let you dive deeper into your data—both financial and non-financial—see your insights in real time and plan with intention across your business. From workforce, capital expense and detailed revenue planning to cash flow, operational planning and business-wide reporting and analysis, you’ll be able to communicate your numbers in a language all your teams will understand. What is Vena’s Extended Planning? Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solutions let you automate tedious finance tasks and integrate data into a centralized secure location so your team can spend more time on what matters most for your business, diving deep into the data and uncovering valuable business insights instead of digging through multiple systems. Extended Planning takes you one step further, where you can include critical operational data and communicate it clearly and effectively across your organization to drive adoption and influence quick and informed business decisions. Extended Planning is the bigger picture part of your planning process and entails looking at the micro details of your data to inform your plans to grow. It’s a deep dive into your operational data to glean insights specific to what is working and what’s not and to constantly chart a course forward. As an ongoing process, Extended Planning turns your business into a strategic, data-driven enterprise with five main goals: 1. Build full business alignment 2. Provide finance with organization-wide visibility 3. Set up your business for change 4. Fuel growth opportunities 5. Build cross-departmental collaboration To learn more on how extended planning and analysis takes the power of FP&A and integrates it throughout your business, read 5 Reasons To Start Thinking About xP&A Now. Benefits of Extended Planning Vena’s Extended Planning enables your team to measure operational performance and KPIs using ad hoc reporting and to use real-time data as a compass to put your plans into action. With rolling forecasts, agile cash flow management, pre-configured templates and flexible scenario modeling capabilities, you’ll be able to adjust your assumptions, mitigate risks, account for change, pivot when necessary and always know where your business stands no matter what happens. In this blog post, we’ll break down the seven main use cases for Vena’s Extended Planning solutions and show you how you can communicate your numbers clearly across your organization, increase adoption and keep your business growing. Keep reading to discover how Vena can help you streamline: 1 Cash Flow Planning 2 Workforce Planning 3 Capital Expense Planning 4 Detailed Revenue Planning 5 Operational Planning 6 What-If Analysis 7 Business-Wide Reporting and Analysis Cash Flow Planning Cash flow is the lifeline of your business so how can you keep it flowing and not leave cash management to chance? Vena’s Extended Planning helps cash planning and management become a strategic function of your organization, enabling you to easily navigate fluctuating cash flow cycles. With Vena’s cash flow planning capabilities, you can create driver-based models that you can run monthly, weekly or daily and adjust your assumptions and cash flow plans at a moment’s notice. If you already work with models you know and like, that’s not an issue. You can use your existing Excel models and financial statements to configure a direct or indirect cash flow statement. Vena even allows you to create scenario models for any situation, so you always know where your business stands, no matter what happens. When it comes to cash flow planning, Vena enables you to be as detailed as you need to be so you can flourish even when economic conditions change, find hidden cash in your business and get the most from your working capital. To discover more on how cash flow planning with Vena empowers businesses to plan for growth, read this blog. Workforce Planning Meeting your current and future business goals means having the right workforce in place now and as your company grows to fill any organizational skill gaps along the way. Building a workforce that is equipped to address the ongoing needs of your business requires effective workforce planning. That’s why you want to make sure you’re diving into the details of workforce planning with Vena. Vena gives you the ability to plan and report at the individual personnel level, from taxes to salaries to fringe benefits. With Vena’s workforce dashboard, you can report, analyze and communicate on payroll plan. You’ll get a clearer picture of one of your business’s biggest expenditures and can then integrate that detailed workforce plan into your overall finance budget. With this level of detail, you can rest assured that your business and workforce will be ready for anything. How can companies, like yours, find ways to keep your workforce resilient in the face of change? Read this blog to find out. Capital Expense Planning While most businesses are focussed on current operational expenses, capital expenses are equally important as you plan to grow your business. But capital expenditures can get out of control quite easily and end up costing your company a lot of money if not planned and handled properly. This is why your operational and capital expense planning should work in tandem. And with Vena’s Extended Planning, they can. Capital expense planning with Vena means accelerating your capital expenditure and operating expense planning with built-in templates for faster time to value. You can integrate detailed capex plans into your operations and budget plans for both future and existing projects and asset acquisitions. Input and manage individual assets by properties, such as book value, useful life, residual amounts and more. Create accurate forecasts with driver-based calculations for common operating expenses. And with integration to your source systems, you’ll always be working with the latest, most accurate details. You’ll never go back to operating without this level of detail and for good reason. The substantial costs and long-term effects of capital expenditures are critical to an organization’s future success. Detailed Revenue Planning Aligning your organizational data to your objectives is simple when you can have all of your numbers in a single source of truth. That’s what Vena’s detailed revenue planning helps you do as you improve your business alignment and gain greater visibility from a central database. Vena lets you create and manage detailed revenue plans based on key operational metrics—with adjust and pivot capabilities at your fingertips—so you can update them easily as conditions change. Since Vena’s revenue planning capabilities automatically aggregate data, this means you can continuously and accurately forecast your product and/or services revenue to stay ahead of sales results and the bottom line. You’ll also be able to easily alter key revenue metrics to improve predictability of revenue forecasts as well as alignment between revenue-driven departments. See how Vena powered profitability analysis for Vanguard University. Operational Planning When you can manage any type of plan from a single platform with Vena's Extended Planning capabilities, project, inventory, demand and marketing planning become a breeze. Project planning in Vena lets you create, plan and report on detailed project plans so you can tie everything back to the bottom line. Vena’s demand planning capabilities help you match capacity against forecasts, monitor inventory flow and model revenue against your key drivers. You can even plan your Marketing with Vena and get detailed plan reports based on ROI and integrations with external CRMs. Nutanix leverages Vena as the single source of truth for all of its demand and supply chain planning activities. Read the full story here. What-If Analysis Making decisions based on insight, not instinct, means testing your assumptions across the business. Vena’s Extended Planning helps you simplify and manage any type of plan—workforce, capital expense, revenue, sales, operational and even marketing—from a secure, single source of truth. Leveraging the Vena Growth Engine’s central database, source system integrations and unlimited modeling capabilities, extended planning in Vena enables you to Collaborate across your organization and get alignment with what-if analysis for any department or type of plan. What-if scenarios help give your business a heads up, to carry out countless scenarios against changing variables, ultimately preparing your company for any situation adequately. When Coca-Cola Consolidated was looking for an OLAP database that could integrate with existing source systems, automate data consolidation and bring the entire cross-functional planning process into one centralized platform, Vena delivered the whole package. Read the full story here. Business-Wide Reporting and Analysis Looking to provide updates to investors, board members and external stakeholders? Bring them all to the table with Vena. You can simplify complex financial and non-financial data with Vena’s intuitive dashboards and analytics. Answer specific questions with a simple click or swipe in the dashboard’s drill down function and move ahead with agility as internal and external key players are aligned with your company’s latest performance and insights. Turn Your Data Into a Direction If the answers to your business questions are hidden in your data, easily bring them to the surface with Vena’s Extended Planning. By turning your data into a direction and understanding your business—past, present and future—you and your teams can constantly challenge your business plans, stay ahead of change and move forward with a shared vision. June 14-18, 2021 Join Us For Vena Nation Week! Learn how Sprout Social, Royal Gold and JF Petroleum connect the dots with workforce and revenue planning and analysis. Join us for The Extended Planning Panel on June 16th from 11:30 - 12:30 pm EDT.

Time-consuming manual data entries. “Final” budget version 59.6-a. Month-long monthly reporting cycles and outdated, unreliable forecasts. If you’re on a finance team that hasn’t embraced automation yet, chances are you’ve run into one (or all) of these issues as you plan for the future of your business. It can be frustrating—the demand for insight is constant and you’re trying to fulfill your role as a strategic, data-driven business partner. But with no automations in place to help you streamline finance-led processes, you’re wrangling numbers from yesterday instead of analyzing and planning for tomorrow. You know you need to simplify business planning so your stakeholders can make smarter decisions, but you can’t drive the growth journey forward if you’re looking in the rearview mirror. That’s where Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solutions really come in handy. Powered by our Growth Engine technology, Finance Led-Planning with Vena helps you automate tedious tasks so you can focus on growing your business. It’s the only planning solution out there that gives you the database functionality you need, but without forcing you to abandon the comfort and flexibility of Excel. In this blog post, we’ll break down the seven main use cases for Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solutions and show you how automation can transform the way you work. Keep on reading to learn more about how Vena can help you streamline: 1 Budgeting 2 Forecasting 3 What-If Analysis 4 Strategic Planning 5 Financial Reporting 6 Management Reporting 7 Dashboarding and KPI Tracking Budgeting According to the 2020 Pulse of Performance Management Survey, finance teams who aren’t happy with their budgeting process have three primary complaints: It’s labor intensive. It takes too long. It’s not easy to administrate. The same poll also found that 82% of teams still use offline spreadsheets for budgeting, even if they already have an existing budgeting software in place. See the pattern here? Excel might be the universal language of business, but it’s not meant to function like a comprehensive database for budgeting, forecasting or any other finance-led process. Budgeting in Excel alone can lead to version control issues, data integrity problems and critical formula errors caused by keying in numbers manually. If you’re constantly worried about whether your analysts are working from the right template—or if you’re tired of sleepless nights and chasing down colleagues for numbers—Finance-Led Planning with Vena can help. Vena’s central database integrates with your source systems to bring company-wide budget figures into one secure platform. Data transfers, input assignments and validation checks are all automated so you don’t have to copy and paste or consolidate numbers manually. Vena also uses a native Excel interface, which means you don’t ever have to wrangle with an unfamiliar environment. You can even map your existing Excel budgeting templates back to the cloud—regardless of whether you use a top-down, bottom-up, driver-based or zero-based approach. YES Communities slashed their budgeting cycle from 3 months down to 6 weeks with Vena. Read the full story here and discover how you can do the same. Forecasting “You’re not forecasting once a month or quarterly. It’s all happening in real time.” That’s an excerpt from a recent Deloitte report predicting the importance of finance automation looking ahead to 2025. It’s easy to see where Deloitte is coming from here, because your business doesn’t operate monthly or quarterly either. Executives need to be able to make informed decisions on the fly and understand how circumstances today will influence the bottom line tomorrow—and that’s why you always need to have reliable forecasts ready at your fingertips. With Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solutions, you can look beyond your static budget and create rolling forecasts at the touch of a button. With your budget and your actuals in one central location, Vena makes it easy to update your business drivers in real time and then automatically apply the impact of those adjustments to your forecast. Once you’ve actualized a certain period, the forecast just rolls into the next one so you always have a clear vision of what’s coming next. You can also view your budget, actuals and forecast from the same template so you can look ahead on demand and uncover actionable insights with agility. Learn more about how Vena can help you stay nimble with rolling forecasts. What-If Analysis Budgeting and forecasting are important, but what happens when business conditions change? What if you need to pivot your plans on a dime? How can you predict the impact of best-case, worst-case and other potential outcomes and prepare your business accordingly? That’s where what-if analysis and scenario modeling come into play. Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solution gives you the freedom to measure how any combination of variables, either internal or external, will affect your bottom-line outlook. All you need to do is input the assumptions you want to test your plans against, then Vena applies that logic across your entire dataset automatically. Once that’s done, you can save each scenario and reference them from within your database—but without compromising the integrity of your actuals or real-time forecasts. Also, because Vena brings your typically siloed data into one place, you’ll be able to draw on all kinds of information for your models, including: Sales data from your CRM Engagement insights from your marketing automation system Employee and headcount data from your HRIS Historical and up-to-date actuals from your ERP or GL Not only will this save you the hassle of pulling data from your source systems manually, but you’ll also be able to paint a clearer picture of how various potential outcomes will affect every arm of your business—ultimately setting the stage for confident, more data-driven decision making. Thanks to Vena, Saint Mary’s University was able to model unique enrollment scenarios and better prepare the school for the COVID-19 pandemic. Read the full story here. Strategic Planning Every organization has high-level targets they’re trying to hit, but aligning the entire business toward those targets is no simple task. If budgeting isn’t accessible, forecasting isn’t reliable and “what-if” business questions aren’t easy to answer quickly, it’s tough to involve non-finance stakeholders in the overall strategic planning process. Strategic planning as a team means ensuring that every cross-functional leader understands how they’re moving the needle. If you don’t make this a priority, you might miss out on opportunities to gather feedback on the financial targets you’re setting—and that’s not very strategic at all. But with Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solutions, shaping your high-level strategy will always feel collaborative. Our native Excel interface makes planning a lot more approachable, because even your non-finance colleagues are familiar with the world’s leading grid. Also, because your forecasts and scenario models update automatically in Vena, they act as an early warning system so you can keep your company-wide growth journey on track. Vena helps you stay in the know and prepare your business for anything—whether it’s five weeks, five months or five years into the future. Financial Reporting Preparing income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements is still a monthly cycle for many finance teams today. But to quote that same Deloitte report from earlier, “Finance goes real time. Periodic reporting will no longer drive operations ...” by the time 2025 rolls around. That means you’ll always need to have real-time actuals available for reporting—because monthly financial statements might be irrelevant as soon as they’re released. The problem with financial reporting, though, is that it’s often a time-consuming manual process. Once you’ve gathered the numbers you need via emails and source system data dumps, you still have to copy it all to your Excel template, verify the correct calculations, validate that everything is correct and then deliver a consolidated report. With no automations to help you, that process could take days or even weeks—especially for regulatory reports or if you rely on other stakeholders for inputs. Finance-Led Planning in Vena takes the stress out of financial reporting. Our source system integrations pull real-time GL numbers into your reporting templates, while our central database lets you slice and dice reports and drill down into the details. Workflows make it easy to assign tasks to each contributor, while audit trails and validation rules ensure your numbers are always correct. WWF-Canada’s finance team used to spend 2 hours on fund balance reporting. With Vena, they can do it in 2 seconds. Learn more here. Management Reporting In order to make well-informed business decisions, your board and management team will always need to know: How are we doing right now? How does that compare to how we were doing before? How are we expected to perform moving forward? What can we do to make sure we get there? If you can’t help your leaders answer those questions easily, they won’t be able to guide the business forward with confidence. Instinct can only get you so far—you have to base your decisions off of insight. Finance-Led Planning with Vena tells the story behind your numbers so you can empower leadership with the data-driven insights they need. Variance reporting is instant because historical performance is automatically compared to your budget, actuals and forecast. Also, because our Excel interface is so easy to use, your leaders can even pull their own custom reports on their own. When they hit you with the tough questions—in the boardroom, on a Zoom call or in the middle of your executive presentation—you’ll always be ready to answer them. The finance team at Coca-Cola Consolidated uses Vena during executive briefings to ensure complete transparency with live financial data. Check out the full story here. Business-Wide Reporting and Analysis Management reports are one thing, but data storytelling is a lot more powerful if you visualize your numbers with dashboards. If you don’t include dashboards in your finance-led planning ecosystem, you might find it difficult to hone in on emerging trends or gauge the impact of specific KPIs. If you can actually see how your business is evolving over time, it’s easier to show your stakeholders exactly what they should focus on. According to the 2020 Pulse of Performance Management survey, more than half of today’s finance professionals prefer Power BI as their solution of choice. That’s why we created the Vena Power BI Connector. With Finance-Led Planning in Vena, you can instantly visualize any aspect of your dataset and share those insights across your business. And instead of trying to build and analyze your dashboards from scratch, you’ll always have the support of Microsoft's industry-leading BI tool. Check out this demo video to see the Vena Power BI Connector in action. Bringing It All Together Vena’s Finance-Led Planning solutions do more than just save you time. They empower you with the freedom to transform the way you do business. Your finance team will become more strategic business partners. Instead of spending your time just organizing numbers, you’ll drive growth across the business through strategic, data-driven analysis. Your tedious offline spreadsheet nightmares will feel like ancient history. Automations make everything simple. The Excel interface keeps everyone comfortable. And you’ll have time to focus on what really matters—helping you business plan for a profitable future. June 14-18, 2021 Join Us For Vena Nation Week! Learn more about finance-led planning and streamlining key processes by joining The FP&A Professionals Panel on June 15th from 11:30 - 12:30 pm EDT.