Rarebreed Scales FP&A With Vena and Extends Planning in Power BI to 130 Practice Managers
Automated recurring pro forma reporting that previously took 1–1.5 days
100+ hospitals supported by a four-person Finance team
Extending planning in Power BI with Acterys, beginning with OPEX planning
The Challenge: Extending FP&A and Planning Participation Across More Than 100 Hospitals
Rarebreed Veterinary Partners was founded in 2018 with a vision to reimagine the veterinary work experience. Headquartered in Portland, Maine, the company has grown into a network of more than 100 veterinary hospitals supported by a central team providing leadership, technology and resources.
When Kendall Kothe, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, joined Rarebreed in 2020, the company had just seven veterinary practices.
“When I came into the company, I was brought on to stand up the finance team,” Kendall said. “We were a startup company.”
Individual practices were still largely reporting through QuickBooks, while Rarebreed was bringing the business onto NetSuite. Producing group-level information meant manually bringing data together, a process that Kendall knew would become increasingly difficult as the company acquired more hospitals.
Rarebreed needed an FP&A environment that could standardize its approach without becoming another short-term solution. It also needed to fit the way Finance already worked. “We knew we needed something that would really standardize our FP&A platform as we merged everybody from QuickBooks into NetSuite,” Kendall said. “We knew it would grow with us.”
Following a recommendation from Rarebreed's NetSuite consultants and an evaluation of several options, the team selected Vena. Its Excel-based experience gave Finance a familiar way to work while providing the centralized planning environment the growing company needed.
The Solution: Building a Scalable FP&A Foundation With Vena and Acterys
Today, Vena supports annual budgeting at the individual hospital level, workforce planning using data from Paylocity, revenue planning by provider, OPEX planning and other detailed finance processes. Vena data also feeds Rarebreed's broader Power BI environment, where practice managers and other field users consume financial and operational performance reports and dashboards.
That foundation has helped a remarkably lean team keep pace with the business. Rarebreed now has more than 100 hospitals, while its finance team remains four people, with three team members handling much of the detailed planning work.
Rarebreed has also automated recurring analytical work. Detailed pro forma reporting that previously required data to be assembled from different systems and took a day to build can now be rolled forward within Vena.
But as Rarebreed's FP&A foundation matured, another constraint became clear. Practice managers could review their area’s budget and actual performance in Power BI, but when they needed to make a change or adjust a forecast, they had to export the data into shared but disparate spreadsheets.
For a group of hospitals, a single round could mean more than 100 individual changes. Kendall said processing those changes could take Finance as long as a week before field teams saw the updated picture.
Rarebreed originally considered bringing hospital leaders directly into Vena but instead found a clearer division of roles: Vena’s Excel planning surface became the core FP&A environment for Finance, while Power BI (through Acterys) became the familiar interface for practice managers and field operations.
“When Acterys came up, we thought, awesome, planning inside our Power BI is the perfect fit for us,” Kendall said.
Rarebreed is beginning with OPEX planning in Power BI for its 2027 budget cycle. The goal is to allow practice managers to enter their own OPEX assumptions through an interface they already use regularly, and be able to see how those decisions affect their budget in real-time. Their inputs write back directly to Rarebreed’s governed enterprise data—no shared files, Finance re-keying, or separate reconciliation step.
The aim is not simply to transfer data entry from one group to another. Rarebreed wants practice managers to understand how operational decisions affect the complete financial picture, while allowing Finance to spend less time re-entering changes and more time reviewing and challenging the plan.
OPEX is the first phase of Rarebreed's Acterys roadmap. Once the team has established that process, Kendall said: “We see the opportunity to extend our planning in Power BI into revenue, cost of goods sold and cost of service planning.”
The destination is a more participative planning model in which Vena provides Rarebreed's Finance team with its established FP&A foundation, while Acterys extends planning into the Power BI environment already familiar to the field.
With Acterys, what's exciting is that our managers can input their plans, and assumptions in Power BI themselves right where they already work every day. They can input, update, and see how it impacts their entire P&L before submitting a final number.