Replaced a fragmented budgeting environment with a flexible, scalable planning technology
Cut portfolio budgeting processes from weeks to days
Expanded Vena adoption to more than 200 users across the organization
The Challenge: Creating a More Transparent and Adaptable Planning Process
Mission Rock Residential manages over 38,000 apartment homes across 18 states, requiring close alignment between Finance, Operations and IT to support a growing third-party property management business.
Bo Pang, SVP of Accounting at Mission Rock Residential, has experienced that growth firsthand. Over his 11 years with the company, he has watched Mission Rock evolve from an organization managing just over 100 communities, with many processes still handled through Excel and even paper, into a growing business with increasingly sophisticated technology needs.
As Mission Rock grew, its approach to property budgeting evolved as well. One of those iterations was the company’s prior budgeting solution, which the organization used for several years.
While Mission Rock ultimately developed a functional model in its prior budgeting solution, maintaining and adapting the environment required a dedicated team and substantial custom development. “For our end users, they had limited visibility into how the model worked. We couldn’t understand how the input correlated to the output,” Bo said.
That reliance on technical expertise also made it harder for Finance to independently evolve its planning processes. Mission Rock needed a solution that could preserve strong governance while giving the people closest to the business greater visibility into, and ownership of, the models they use.
After a detailed evaluation of multiple budgeting vendors in 2024, including a reassessment of the prior solution, Mission Rock selected Vena for its flexibility, deep Microsoft integration, and implementation methodology.
The Solution: Empowering Finance While Building for Scale
Mission Rock approached its Vena implementation as an opportunity to build a planning foundation that could evolve with the business. Working with Vena Professional Services, Finance, Operations and IT came together to scope requirements, establish that foundation and prepare users for adoption.
Today, Vena supports more than 200 users across different roles, while Mission Rock operates the platform with a leaner project team than it required with the prior solution. Because Vena works in the familiar Excel environment, Finance users such as Bo can troubleshoot formulas, modify reports and update templates themselves rather than relying solely on technical resources.
That self-sufficiency has enabled continuous improvement. After its first budgeting cycle, Mission Rock significantly consolidated its templates. Properties now work through approximately four core templates, or five when workforce planning is included. Bo completed much of that consolidation himself, reducing the number of templates users need to load, refresh and navigate during budgeting.
“I know Excel well enough that I can go in and make changes to the template and the report myself. I did most of the template consolidation this year, and that has been a game changer for us,” Bo said.
Vena’s flexibility is also delivering measurable time savings. When Mission Rock took on a larger portfolio consisting of numerous smaller assets, the team needed a faster way to create individual property budgets. Rather than building 30 or 40 individual budgets separately, Mission Rock created a Vena process that lets its business team plan at the portfolio level, establish allocation percentages and make targeted adjustments for individual properties. Once planning is complete, the team can also generate consolidated portfolio reporting rather than assembling separate packages for every property.
As Mission Rock becomes more self-sufficient, Vena’s Expert Managed Services team continues to provide technical guidance, help troubleshoot ETL requirements and identify more efficient ways to manage processes. Bo describes that ongoing support as invaluable, giving the team the confidence to experiment and expand its use of Vena.
Now, Mission Rock is looking beyond budgeting. The company plans to expand its use of Vena across FP&A, including scenario-based planning and potential automation of processes such as bonus calculations using data already available in the platform.
Mission Rock is working to bring information from Vena, their property management software, and other systems together to support reliable insights and emerging AI capabilities. “We’re excited to see Vena developing AI agents and connectors that can help us become more efficient. At the end of the day, that’s where we all want to be.”
As Mission Rock grows, Vena provides a flexible planning foundation that can adapt as new properties and portfolios join the business. With greater Finance ownership, trusted data, and room to expand into new use cases, Mission Rock is building a planning environment designed to scale alongside its growth.
I truly believe an AI strategy is a data strategy. You have to have the data laid out in an orderly fashion for AI to make an impact and produce reliable outputs. There’s so much data within Vena that we can leverage. It’s really about how we bring everything together and use that data to make an impact.”