With Vena, the FP&A team now owns and manages budgeting for 200+ apartment properties efficiently and at scale
Budget reporting that once took days now takes just minutes with Vena’s dynamic reporting tools
Departments across the business now have self-serve access to their own budgets
The Challenge: Transitioning 200+ Property Budgets From IT to Finance—Without Losing Control
Before Michelle Holder started as Director of FP&A at Bell Partners—a leading US apartment investment and management business, the company's entire budgeting process, including budgets for over 200 apartment communities—was managed by the IT department. They used Citrix to create and maintain budgets both for Bell Partners itself and its 200 apartment communities.
“Someone would put in a help-desk ticket if they needed a new budget created, and there was a different template for each property that had to be maintained,” Michelle remembers. Data would then be exported from Citrix to another solution for reporting.
When a new vice president joined the company, he recognized the inefficiencies of the existing setup and moved budgeting responsibility from IT to the FP&A team. That’s when Michelle was hired—tasked with overseeing all budgeting and forecasting.
To support the transition, Bell Partners began evaluating FP&A platforms. That’s when they chose Vena. “It was the best tool that we saw out there that would do everything we needed,” Michelle says. “It was more flexible than the other tools on the market.”
Streamlining Budgeting, Forecasting and Executive Reporting At Scale
Michelle and her team quickly put Vena to work, using the platform to consolidate data across the business and taking over budgeting and forecasting for all the properties Bell Partners manages co-owns and operates. “Those are going on at different times,” Michelle says. “We also have a construction module that is set up to do renovation budgeting and forecasting.”
In addition to streamlining budgeting, forecasting, and scenario planning, Vena has also helped Michelle introduce dynamic reporting, cutting the time to generate budget drafts from days to minutes. “[Previously] it took them a couple of days each time they had a draft that was due, to do the reporting,” Michelle says. “Now we pause the process, run the reports, unpause the process. It's super quick. That saves days of work.”
Today, Michelle can build an ad-hoc report in five minutes. And, with Vena’s self-service module, departments are able to access their own budgets directly, saving Michelle and her FP&A team significant time and effort.
Vena’s Microsoft PowerPoint integration allows Michelle’s team to export a monthly executive-facing slide to keep the CEO informed, a capability she plans to expand. She is also exploring Vena’s embedded Microsoft Power BI for enhanced visualization. “We want to be able to see how our draft budgets are looking instantaneously, to see, ‘Is something missing? Did somebody not budget an account?’” Michelle says.
With Vena, Bell Partners has replaced outdated, manual workflows with a centralized, finance-owned solution that scales across more than 200 properties. Reporting that once took days now takes minutes. Departments manage their own budgets through self-serve access. And the FP&A team—freed from version control and consolidation chaos—can finally focus on strategic analysis and performance planning.
Our corporate process prior to Vena was sending out Excel spreadsheets for everybody to input. And then they would take all those Excel spreadsheets and consolidate them to get consolidated numbers. Now that consolidation is instantaneous. That's days worth of work that is saved by having Vena.”
Michelle Holder
Director of FP&A, Bell Partners