The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the business world forever, with one of the drastic and more obvious after-effects being the shift toward remote work. According to this report from Global Workplace Analytics, 82% of employees in the U.S. want to continue working from home for at least one day per week. Finance and operations leaders at the firms embracing this trend have likely had to tweak how they approach budgeting for operating expenses (OpEx)—because while your firm might be saving money on rent, travel and promotional events, you’re probably spending more on cloud technology, employee engagement initiatives and new digital experiences for your clients.  Individual companies will all have their own strategies for making remote work feasible based on their size, structure and industry. But in any case, managing changes to your OpEx budget while prioritizing your bottom line requires the freedom to look ahead and respond quickly when OpEx needs evolve. If you don’t have the flexibility to analyze every single line item—or if you’re managing your OpEx budget manually with offline Excel spreadsheets—you might miss out on opportunities to make your new remote work plans more efficient. You don’t want to burn cash needlessly—especially after the last 12 months—and that’s why you need to arm yourself with reliable, up-to-date OpEx data. Read on to discover three important steps for optimizing your OpEx budget for a hybrid or fully-remote work environment. We’ll also give you some examples of how organizations just like yours have navigated similar changes with a data-driven approach to OpEx planning. Make OpEx Budgeting More Collaborative Across Departments With Workflows As you make changes to your OpEx budget in preparation for remote work, you’ll find that each of your departments have their own requirements for making it happen. For example: Your sales and customer service teams might have to invest in a new communications tool while your marketing team recoups sponsorship dollars from a cancelled in-person conference. Your department heads know better than anyone what their teams will need to adapt—and that’s why OpEx budgeting needs to be collaborative instead of siloed in finance. If your finance team is calling the shots on where to save money and where to spend it, departmental leaders and budget owners won’t feel like they’re part of the planning process. This will lead to business plans that might look good on paper, but probably aren’t very practical or conducive to efficient operations. You can avoid this by building workflows for collaborative OpEx budgeting so stakeholders across departments can review remote work plans before they’re finalized. That way, instead of having your finance team manage OpEx changes from the top down, your department heads can work together to deliver solutions that work best for the business. Consider this example from Young Life—a nonprofit Christian youth ministry with a global summer camping operation. When the pandemic shuttered camps and forced Young Life’s corporate team to work remotely, finance leaders teamed up with camp managers to adjust each location’s OpEx budget. With detailed review and approval workflows already in place, it was easy to ensure the new budgets included input from department heads at each camp. According to Brandon Combs, Young Life’s Director of Camping Budgets and Finance, this ultimately helped the charity “stave off some major losses because we were strategic, not reactionary.”   “Our people feel a lot more valued because they’re a lot closer to the business and I’d definitely say they’re delivering more reliable budgets as a result,” says Brandon. “When we’re trying to make your business more sustainable in the face of change, it can’t be a guy in finance telling you how much toilet paper to buy for your camp. It has to be the person who’s actually making that purchase.” Model the Bottom-Line Impact of Potential OpEx Changes With What-If Analysis As you iron out your plans for hybrid or fully-remote work, you’ll need to understand how the changes will affect your financial position. Factors to consider might include: Will you keep your office space, ditch it, or rent it out?   Will you provide remote employees with a stipend to cover their work-from-home expenses?   Do you need to invest in IT or software tools for data security?   Does working remotely mean we have to outsource production, distribution or fulfilment? What will that cost?   Are there any OpEx items we can cut or defer now that we’re remote? The answers to these questions should be included in what-if analysis as you explore all of your options and chart the best path for your business. If you don’t test your assumptions and assess multiple different OpEx scenarios thoroughly, you won’t be able to justify your remote work plans with reliable data.  Metro Supply Chain Group, a global third-party logistics provider, has helped a lot of growing companies optimize their fulfilment operations in the remote world. Given that supply chain costs are petty big line items in any firm’s OpEx budget—and perhaps even more so as companies go remote—Metro always ensures their clients make the best decisions by helping them visualize the impact of potential changes to their plans.  “We can run multiple scenarios and use multiple forecasts to aid decision making,” says Paolo Mari, Metro’s VP of Business Analytics. “Operational metrics are important, but the story is not complete until you can see how they impact your costs, revenue and EBITDA margins.” Invest in OpEx Items That Will Drive New Revenue Streams in the Remote World If your OpEx budgets are a team effort and you can support them with what-if analysis, you might even find opportunities to make some more money as your business goes remote. You could rent out your unneeded office space, for example, or enter a new geographic territory with a fully-remote team.  Global Workforce Analytics makes a strong business case for remote work in this report, citing increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, lower office costs and more. It’s important to remember, though, that all of those things are circumstantial—because if you want to grow your business while adapting to a remote work environment, you need to look long and hard at what’s really driving your revenue. Then you can align your OpEx budget to support those areas of the business and make changes proactively as you adjust to the new normal.  Meats By Linz, a food distribution company specializing in high-quality beef products, was quick to adjust their OpEx strategy when the pandemic shook their business last spring. With revenue from restaurant sales evaporating, CFO Bart Vittori knew he needed a plan to help mitigate the damage and to drive new revenue streams—all while tweaking OpEx budgets for remote office work and safer frontline operations. After teaming up with sales and marketing leaders and modeling the impact of various revenue scenarios, Bart found that the company’s B2C e-commerce channel—which usually wasn’t given much attention from an OpEx standpoint—needed a serious facelift. So when he shifted OpEx on the fly and allocated resources toward advertising their B2C offering, revenue from e-commerce rose dramatically in a short timeframe. None of that would have been possible, Bart says, if OpEx budgeting was siloed and manual.   “I quickly analyzed, ‘Okay, if we’re down 80% in this segment, what will that mean long term? How can we keep our employees safe? What investments can we make to drive sales elsewhere?’ That would have taken months if I was still using spreadsheets,” he says. “The reports showed us that e-commerce was our only viable revenue segment through all this, so we doubled down on our marketing spend and started to make it work. We thought it would take three years to add this many B2C customers, but we did it in three months.” Simplify OpEx Budgeting With Vena Complete Planning Regardless of your company’s intentions for hybrid or full-remote work, optimizing your OpEx plans proactively is the key to making it successful. Working collaboratively, looking ahead and making data-driven decisions is crucial—and that’s why you need to enable yourself with the right tools for the job.

With the global pandemic, the risk of unemployment and homelessness has increased across North America, making the need for affordable housing a prime concern across communities. Thankfully, organizations like the King County Housing Authority (KCHA) continue to provide affordable housing for those who are at greatest risk. As a leader in affordable housing, the KCHA works diligently to ensure that they can provide housing solutions for those in need. Based in Tukwila, Washington, KCHA owns over 135 properties across 34 different cities in the state of Washington and serves 19,000 families, including homeless families, seniors and disabled people living on fixed incomes, the working poor and families with moderate incomes.  KCHA’s goal is to continue to effectively administer rental housing assistance, develop and manage affordable housing and address local priorities such as ending homelessness, improving educational outcomes for low-income youth and assuring that disabled and elderly households can live with dignity. KCHA’s operating budgets determines its future ability to serve low-income households, so it is essential to accurately forecast and manage its total funding and spending for the year. If its budgets are not completed on time or accurately, it could be detrimental to its goals. Unfortunately KCHA’s inefficient budgeting processes were leading it to spend far too much time managing the templates, macros and reports and less time on the actual analysis of the proposed budgets. Here are five ways KCHA organized its budgeting to achieve its goals: 1. Simplified Excel Templates To a Single Source KCHA receives funding from various sources including tenant rents, grants and Section 8 and Operating Fund subsidies from the Department of Housing & Urban Development so it is important to plan and track how this funding is spent year over year. “One of the biggest challenges is that our budgeting is complicated and Excel was getting too difficult and time-consuming to manage. Excel just couldn’t handle the complexity,” says Wendy Teh, Financial Planning Manager at KCHA. When you have complex allocations based on properties, units, and employees—keeping track of standard Excel sheets can become very burdensome. KCHA had over 100 separate budgeting templates built within Excel, all of which needed a great deal of time to roll up manually through marcos and left room for mistakes to occur. Budgeting in Vena allowed the team to work from a centralized database that provided a single source of truth rather than working from multiple data sources. Instead of 100 budgeting templates being organized and managed across departments, now the team could work collaboratively from this single source. They didn’t need to worry about organizing multiple templates via email anymore and now the team has accurate reporting since all of their data updates automatically as changes are made.  2. Provided an Auditing Trail To Track Changes  Auditing trails are key to tracking potential mistakes. Something as simple as an extra comma or number in budgeting data could have serious consequences. “We were spending a lot of time making sure our macros and formulas were correct and the hardest part was that we had no audit trail if a change was made to one of our templates or reports,” explains Wendy.  For example, if KCHA’s employee headcount increased for the year, the allocation would need to be adjusted. The same could be said if there was an increase in housing units purchased or developed for the year. All of these allocation changes were done manually— spreadsheet by spreadsheet by the KCHA planning team. Not only was this tedious, it left room for mistakes to occur in the reports which could lead to missed opportunities for the agency to help more low income families. With Excel, KCHA had no way to determine when these kinds of mistakes occurred or by whom. Tracking changes in Vena is far easier since it provides a centralized database to manage all of the data for input and output reporting, giving KCHA the ability to have an auditing trail if changes are made.  3. Consolidated Excel Templates To Save Time Like most finance teams, KCHA was under a time constraint when the planning season came around. Their standard Excel templates had very slow loads due to the size and complexity of the files and the team would often find themselves running macros that could take hours. This challenge often left the finance team scrambling to get all budgets loaded accurately and in time for the Board of Commissioners to approve. “Our Board of Commissioners had to approve the budget before the end of the current fiscal year so we had to have all the templates loaded and reports completed as accurately as possible in a very short timeframe.  It always felt like we were pressed for time,” explained Wendy. Without direct board approval for the year, new acquisitions, development projects, maintenance requirements and additional hires could not be undertaken and delays would ensue. With Vena’s database, KCHA removed the need for multiple Excel spreadsheets and effectively ran complex formulas without slow macro loads. The planning team was able to get their reporting done in  much less time to share the budget with the board and get the approval needed before the new fiscal year began. This time savings also enabled the planning team to be able to spend more time providing meaningful analysis. 4. Provided a Tool That Was Easy To Use There’s nothing worse than implementing a new tool or software that teams are hesitant to use. There’s always a learning curve with any new software, but since KCHA’s teams were already familiar with Excel, moving over to Vena was pretty easy. “Our teams were used to seeing Excel and working with it. We wanted user acceptance of a new tool and since our teams were not just finance people, we wanted a tool that was easy to use and Vena allowed for that” says Wendy. Vena provided an intuitive solution so that the budgets could be consolidated easily and designed in a way that everyone across the organization, regardless of role, could easily understand them. Ultimately, the solution allowed the teams to quickly collaborate and oversee budgeting while keeping track of any task progress across departments. Since different teams were working together on budgets, decisions could be made faster, empowering finance time to get the budget completed earlier. 5. Removed Any Blockers or Challenges With Agility As with any new solution implementation, there can be unique challenges that have to be addressed. But challenges or blockers don’t come up until a team really starts using the solution and that’s when the questions roll in. “We got to know the system a little prior to implementation, but you don’t quite understand it well enough to ask the right questions. When we did ask questions, the implementation and services team was amazing and very good at listening to exactly what we needed,” explained Wendy. Part of the solution to ensure KCHA had all of their budgeting done effectively was to remove any kind of blockers or challenges. These could range from a simple learning curve that the team needed assistance with overcoming, or a request for the team to implement a specific consolidation on reports. At the end of the day, the goal was to ensure that KCHA was empowered to continue its mission to provide quality affordable housing to those in need.   Focusing on the Future With Vena, KCHA was able to develop and manage its budgets effectively on an easy-to-use platform, allowing its teams to save time and work more collaboratively. They now have an audit trail if changes occur on any of their templates and reports. All of their templates are automatically consolidated which saves the finance team a lot of valuable time during the busy planning season. They also have peace of mind knowing that the Vena team will ensure that any of their challenges are effectively resolved. Now that KCHA’s inefficient budgeting processes are a thing of the past, they can focus their efforts on their goal of attaining more affordable housing for those in need.

Numbers paint a picture, tell a story, reveal the truth. As one of the minds leveraging those numbers, it’s your job, as part of the finance team, to tell that story and paint a picture that helps everyone better understand your company’s financial performance—all with the goal of getting to the truth behind your organization’s overall health. And one of the most important tools you’ll draw on to achieve that is your financial reporting.  Built around three foundational documents—your income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement—financial reporting provides a comprehensive picture of your business’s financial results and trends. In doing so, it helps you deliver insights and informs the decisions made throughout your company and beyond. Everyone from your executives, board members and department-level staff as well as the regulators, creditors and stakeholders with a vested interest in your organization rely on the numbers revealed within your financial reporting.   There’s a lot you can learn from the numbers in your financial statements. You just need to know how to look at them. And that starts with the following: Your Core Financial Statements Three core statements make up the foundation of your financial reporting. Your income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement each provide a key piece of your organization’s story. They’ll become the base of the reporting you file for tax purposes and creditors, the documents you provide to regulatory bodies like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the data you draw on for your Annual Report and internal documents, dashboards and reporting.  The income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement fit together to reveal a big picture view of your business. Here’s a brief description of each: What Is the Income Statement?  Your income statement, otherwise known as your profit and loss (P&L) statement or statement of earnings, tells you exactly what it purports—how much income you’ve got coming in or not. In other words, it shows you how profitable your business is based on the relationship between revenues and expenses. Your income statement outlines revenues and expenses and is used to measure your organization’s profits and losses during the reporting timeframe. In doing so, it helps measure the profitability of your business. What Is the Balance Sheet? Also known as your statement of net worth or statement of financial position, your balance sheet looks at your business’s total assets, liabilities and shareholders’ equity. It allows you to measure rates of return and demonstrates how your assets are financed—whether that’s through debt or equity. Your balance sheet is a key document for shareholders, regulators and tax authorities looking to determine the health of your organization. What Is the Cash Flow Statement? Your cash flow statement provides critical data on how your money is being spent, where it’s coming from and whether there’s enough available to keep up with operating expenses and ongoing debt repayment. It tracks cash movement for stakeholders of all kinds—including investors and creditors, as well as your own team—and must eventually be reconciled to the bank to make sure you’ve covered all your cash transactions. Your cash flow statement can be prepared in one of two ways: the direct or indirect cash flow methods. Both calculate your net cash flow from operating activities, with the main distinctions being the starting point, the types of calculations you use and the level of detail in the information you disclose. The 5 Types of Financial Ratios  Those three foundational financial statements provide you with the numbers you need to tell the story of your financial health, empowering you with key data both your internal and external stakeholders will draw on to establish critical insights about your business. But the numbers themselves are just the start—developing true insight starts with some basic calculations. Otherwise known as financial ratios. Financial ratios enable you to perform quantitative analysis that lets you understand your organization better. There’s an entire list you can draw from to better tell the story of your business. All of them fall under one of five main categories: 1. Profitability Ratios determine your organization’s ability to generate profit relative to revenue, operating costs, balance sheet assets and shareholder equity. Return On Assets (ROA), for example, measures your company’s efficiency in generating earnings from assets by showcasing how much profit your company can gain from those assets. 2. Liquidity Ratios measure your company’s ability to pay off its current debt without raising extra capital. Your Current Ratio, for example, looks at current assets in relation to current liabilities to help investors better understand your organization’s ability to pay off short-term debt obligations. 3. Efficiency Ratios calculate how well your business manages its assets and liabilities internally. Your Inventory Turnover Ratio, for instance, measures the rate at which your company turns over inventory in a specified period, helping you better determine pricing and when to purchase new inventory. 4. Leverage Ratios determine how much of your organization’s capital is assumed through debt and evaluate how reliant you are on debt for growth. Your Debt-to-Equity (D/E) Ratio, for example, calculates how much your equity is leveraged against your outstanding debt to determine how much of your business is financed through debt. 5. Market Value Ratios calculate your publicly held company’s current share price, helping investors evaluate whether those shares are overpriced or underpriced. For example, your Earnings Per Share Ratio looks at your company’s profit in relation to outstanding shares to let you and your investors know how much money your company earns from each share of its stock. Financial, Operational and Managerial Reporting  Of course, your financial reporting isn’t the only type of reporting happening in your organization. Management reporting (or managerial reporting) and operational reporting are just as important for building your business, moving your organization towards its goals and providing an up-to-the-moment picture of your day-to-day operations. They’ll help you better understand the root causes of your organization’s financial health. Let’s look at each in turn: Financial reporting: As outlined above, your financial reporting looks at your financial results and supporting information. In doing so, it provides you with key data that informs your internal business decisions and is shared externally with shareholders, regulators, creditors and investors. As such, it needs to meet certain regulatory requirements and follow a specific format.  Management reporting isn’t regulated in the same way. That’s because, for the most part, your managerial reports are only used internally, for everything from your day-to-day decision making to Board of Directors reporting. You may choose to include forecasting or predictive data, segment down to different parts of the business or departments and incorporate an operational view for a fuller, more integrated picture of your business.  Operational reporting shares the details of your organization’s day-to-day operations with data around such things as production costs, resource expenditures and the processes you have in place. How often you choose to report on each will depend on your organization, but the point is to concentrate on the short term and to drill down into the areas that will provide the insights your company needs to operate day to day. Together, all of this reporting will tell a fuller story of your business and its needs. But keeping pace with all of those reporting requirements can be a challenge—especially when you take into consideration standards such as the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and international financial reporting standards (IFRS), which regulate your financial reporting and can be time-consuming for your team to maintain. GAAP and IFRS: The Financial Reporting Standards  Depending on the industry you work in, you may have unique reporting requirements you’ll need to adhere to—but two main sets of standards continue to regulate financial reports across industries. Whether you adhere to GAAP or IFRS will depend on where your company is listed and where your stakeholders operate.  GAAP and IFRS are both designed to offer a set of general rules and guidelines for reporting and to ensure everyone is working by a standard set of methods and definitions. Organizations working across borders or handling international mergers and acquisitions may be required to keep up with both. Standard What it Stands For Summary GAAP (or U.S. GAAP)  Generally Accepted Accounting Principles The standard set of rules for financial reporting in the U.S., GAAP is adhered to by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). GAAP covers topics such as retained earnings, revenue recognition, financial statement presentation, balance sheet classification, liabilities, foreign currency, transactions and so on.  IFRS International Financial Reporting Standards Put out by the IFRS Foundation and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), IFRS is currently used in over 140 countries worldwide, including the European Union. It establishes a common language and standardized definitions across countries and continents, covering topics such as the presentation of financial statements, revenue recognition, employee benefits, fixed and intangible assets, etc. Find out more about GAAP and IFRS as well as how to balance all of your reporting needs. Your Financial Reporting Timeline  While the timing of your operational reporting and managerial reporting is up to you—and will depend on your goals, processes and the resources you have to draw from—financial reporting has a cadence of its own. For public companies, the timing of some filings are regulated by bodies such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), while others are set internally and will depend on your individual organization and stakeholder demands.  Here’s a rundown of some of the key dates in your financial reporting timeline.  Annual Reporting  Form 10-K  Due within 60 to 90 days of the closing of your fiscal year. Produced annually, Form 10-K is an SEC filing required of all publicly held companies and designed to comply with specified guidelines. In addition to your audited financial reports, it includes detailed information on operations and provides discussion points that help investors assess your business performance as well as the risks facing your company.  Annual Report Usually published within three to four months from the end of your fiscal year. Your Annual Report is designed largely for shareholders and often featured on your corporate website. It can be glossy, colored and dynamically designed and is usually an abbreviated version of what’s included in your Form 10-K. It features information on company activity and finances, including your balance sheet and income statement.  Quarterly Reporting Form 10-Q Due within 45 days from the end of each quarter. Your 10-Q is filed quarterly to the SEC and is another standard requirement for publicly held companies. It offers a view of performance over the quarter that’s passed, with fewer details than Form 10-K and financial statements that are usually unaudited. It can offer insight into the changes your organization is experiencing and provide a timely sense of any legal risks that might be forming. Quarterly Report Usually shared a few weeks after the end of each quarter. Your Quarterly Report collects your ongoing, unaudited financial statements on a three-month cycle—including your balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement. In addition to giving stakeholders a sense of your quarterly figures, it may also include year-to-date information and comparative data from past quarters. Monthly Reporting Month-End Reports Produced anywhere between a few days and a few weeks after the end of each month. Your month-end reports help you stay on top of your financial performance and ensure everything continues to run smoothly. Done largely for internal use, monthly reporting doesn’t have the same external uses as much of the reporting above—meaning that the form and timeline it takes will vary based on your company’s needs. You’ll usually want to include your balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement, but depending on your business may choose to supplement those with additional reporting, such as a bank covenant report, an analysis of inventory, your debt/EBITDA ratio, working capital analysis and so on. This monthly reporting will help facilitate ongoing decision making and ensure you’re working towards your company goals. Financial Reporting Challenges and Examples  Financial reporting is a basic requirement of your finance team and clearly a critical part of business activities such as strategic planning, investor relations, taxes and SEC filings. But just because it’s so critical and pervasive doesn’t mean it isn’t without its challenges. Here are a few examples of common issues your team may be facing as you work to meet your financial reporting needs: It can be manual and time consuming. Reporting can take a lot from your team, both in terms of time and effort—even if you’re using a software like Excel. As you push beyond what Excel was meant to be used for—from sourcing and manipulating your data to sharing your reports with applicable stakeholders in a variety of formats—it can start to get tedious for your team and drain the resources you have. More scalable technology and automation can help you get more value from your finance team and cut down on the work spent on repetitive, manual tasks.  There’s potential for inaccuracies. With all of that manual labor comes the chance for— even the inevitability of—mistakes. Those could come in the form of information that gets lost in translation, or be the result of data that’s entered incorrectly. Whatever the reason, those mistakes can be more than just a nuisance—they can have serious repercussions on your final published results and the accuracy of your regulatory and stakeholder reporting.  It can be incompatible with deeper analysis. While the data your financial reporting offers will be integral to your organization’s success, when it exists in a silo it’s harder to apply to the deeper analysis you need. By bridging your different types of reporting—and using technology that allow you to drill down into deeper levels of detail, apply real-time forecasting and visualize your data in a variety of ways—you can start to build more powerful insights from your numbers. The right tools can help you improve your financial governance to build a more efficient and accurate process for your financial reporting—and ensure it’s offering you the chance to dive into the insights you need.  Find out how Vena customer PRGX Global overcame their reporting hurdles.  Exploring the Numbers With Financial Dashboards Better tools can help you build a more efficient financial reporting process and enable you to share your results organization-wide so that everyone is working towards the same goals. One such popular tool is the dashboard. Dashboards are a powerful snapshot of your business, made by tracking holistic metrics and KPIs—from financial and operational metrics to those that look at sales and marketing, HR and customer success. They communicate your performance against your strategies and values and track the ongoing health of your organization, pulling from multiple data sources—including your financial reporting data—to offer a single view.  In doing so, dashboards help you leverage your data to drive your business forward, facilitate collaboration and transparency and communicate performance to your executive team and organization as a whole. They also empower finance teams to focus on key company metrics and help your entire organization better understand how those metrics are affecting the company’s bottom line. When produced effectively and efficiently using the right technology, dashboards can provide transparency and access to your entire organization.  The right dashboards will help you track and evaluate your entire organization’s financial performance—giving you more relevant and reliable visibility into the health of the business as a whole. And for many companies, that visibility starts with three key dashboards: 1. Business Health Dashboards: Business health dashboards evaluate both short- and long-term financial metrics, based on your company’s short- and long-term goals. For full transparency and visibility, they should also include budget to actual variance analysis. 2. Employee Health Dashboards: Employee trends and behavior affect a company’s bottom line and, as such, are a vital measurement for finance teams. Effectively tracking and acting on employee health findings means working closely with HR and syncing HR data with financial data to determine what the numbers mean for your business. 3. Customer Health Dashboards: Measuring how existing customer relationships are impacting your bottom line can help sales and customer success teams understand where they should focus their efforts and resources. Customer health data also provides insight into the stability of your company’s overall customer service function. Read more about these three critical dashboards. Essential Financial Dashboard Metrics By offering ongoing financial data, dashboards help you keep on top of your organizational performance, to make sure everyone is working off the same information and building towards the same business goals. They let you dig deeper into that data and connect it with your operational and management reporting, so that you have a holistic, connected view of your business.  So what financial metrics should you focus on as you populate those dashboards? A few of the most popular include: 1. Operating cash flow: A measurement of how much money your business is bringing in from its daily operations, your operating cash flow offers insights into whether your organization is in a good position for growth and whether you’ll be able to maintain a positive cash flow. 2. Operating expenses: The expenses your organization incurs through standard operations—including rent, inventory costs, payroll, insurance, inventory costs, etc.—your operating expenses (OPEX) help determine where you might be able to make cuts during tighter times. 3. Net profit margin: By showing you how well your business is building profit as compared to revenue and what percentage of each dollar earned is actually profit, your net profit margin will determine how fast your organization is growing and how well it’s meeting long-term goals. 4. Working capital: By tracking available cash, short-term investments and accounts receivable, your working capital tells you how well your business is able to generate cash quickly and whether you’re able to meet your short-term financial obligations.  5. Sales growth: By measuring your sales team’s ability to increase revenue over a certain period of time, sales growth offers insight into your organization’s profitability and whether your business is growing or stagnating.  Just as important as choosing the right metrics for your business is ensuring everyone has a clear definition of each and knows why you’re measuring it. By putting everyone on the same page, you’ll keep everyone working towards the same goals. Learn more about how to use your financial reporting data to fuel operational success. The Benefits of Automating Financial Reporting  The right tools can help your team streamline your financial reporting as well as your managerial and operational reporting—and bring everything together through effective and meaningful dashboards. By automating repetitive manual tasks, you’ll also get more done in less time and free up your team to focus on analyzing the numbers, uncovering new information and shaping the strategic direction of your business. In doing so, automation can help you: 1. Better ensure accuracy and data integrity. You’ll be able to ensure your data is sourced accurately and nothing gets lost in translation or gets missed due to human error. 2. Make better, faster decisions. You’ll be able to turn your data into insights—and put those insights into action—faster. 3. Boost stakeholder satisfaction. Automation will help you get more accurate data and more powerful insights in front of your stakeholders more quickly. 4. Turn information into action. By automating the repeatable tasks, you’ll be able to spend more time developing actionable insights for your business. Automation can also help you build a better audit trail by creating a log of your data, workflows and processes. This gives stakeholders a lens into the data you pulled from and the calculations you performed and helps identify any potential errors that might have happened along the way. You’ll be able to highlight any red flags early and deal with them before they become more serious problems.  All of which can help you up your financial reporting game—getting to the truth behind the numbers faster and more effectively.  Find out what other benefits you can gain by automating your financial reporting.

Can you ever have too much data? The answer, of course, is yes—especially when that data is poor in quality or isn’t contributing to your overall goals. But meaningful data is an asset to any organization. And when applied well and shared appropriately, the data you extract from your financial reporting will join those ranks—helping to fuel your business decisions and organizational alignment through the months and years to come.  Whether you’re keeping your investors informed, bringing shareholders up to speed or paying your taxes, you’ll of course draw on data from your financial reporting for external use. But you’ll use it internally as well, to unearth key operational insights that help your entire organization identify inefficiencies and work together towards your business goals.  To achieve that type of insight, though, you need to know how to use your financial reporting to recognize when the reallocation of resources or introduction of new investments are required—and when they’re critical to your business’s success. You’ll also have to connect the rest of your company to the data and insights your financial reporting reveals, so that everyone has a clear understanding of your organization’s financial state and the next steps you need to take to achieve your business goals.  By doing so, you can start to take a holistic approach to operational change—both at the organization-wide level and across every department. To get there, start by considering the following: Building Operational Insights for Organizational Success Your financial reporting provides key data that will help you identify and inform the operational changes you make—but only when you put it to use. Through the application of financial ratios, scenario modeling and other tools, you’ll begin to reveal critical insights that help identify potential inefficiencies or red flags that could mean problems if not addressed. Those insights will play a critical role as you move your business forward. With that in mind, consider four ways your financial reporting can help fuel your operations and put you on the right path to organizational success. 1. Understand Your Baseline How much profit are you making per unit sold? How reliant is your business on debt? What’s your operating margin? Details like these will help you create a baseline of knowledge around your company’s overall health, which will fuel your business strategy going forward.  By comparing your operating income with sales and tracking it over time, for instance, your operating margin—how much your organization is making from its core business—will help you understand profitability trends over time. Thisin turn may show you where to dive deeper and examine your cash position. You’ll be able to see whether your pricing strategy is working and the overall operational efficiency of your business. All of which will let you know when you need to shift your strategy or make operational changes to maintain profitability and stay on the path to growth. 2. Determine How Well You’re Managing Growth and Decline By measuring your revenue over time, you can begin to identify whether you’re in a position of growth or decline, while comparing your gross profit to sales over time will allow you to see whether cost increases are outpacing revenue gains. This type of data will help inform your growth strategy or determine whether the growth plan you have is sustainable or not.  Comparing your financial data over time will also help you pinpoint variable and fixed expenses in your organization—information that will allow you to make better decisions on spending and debt. There may even be a scale of efficiency (or inefficiency) when demand exceeds capacity—achieving a better understanding of that will also help you manage your growth plans.  3. Reveal How Much Cash You’re Generating Through Operations  By showing you how much cash flow is coming into your business through operations, your financial reporting adds clarity on the sustainability of your organization and the pace at which you can self-fund growth. (This is where the direct cash flow method is particularly revealing, offering details that aren’t available using the indirect method.) There may be a good reason to run a negative cash flow for a period of time, but it’s not something your business will be able to sustain forever. Rather, it’s best to use your cash flow to ensure your receivables stay healthy and your cash position high. If you are cash rich, on the other hand, you might use your cash flow to understand excess liquidity so that you can put it to work—funding growth or initiatives internally or perhaps even looking for external investment paths. 4. Better Plan for the Future Finally, you can also use the data in your financial reporting to build comparisons against planned scenarios—including budgets, forecasts and what-ifs—to make sure you’re realizing your business’s full ambitions. Through the wealth of data you’ve gathered, you’ll be able to stay on top of future scenarios and better understand the levers you can pull to adjust your course for improved operational efficiency and optimized business growth. Forecasting and scenario modeling can help your organization build towards its strategic plan and stay on track and aligned. By helping you see ahead, they’ll ensure you remain ready for future change and enable better informed business decision making every step of the way.   But when you’re doing all of this to create real operational change, it helps to take a team approach. And that means sharing that information with the rest of your organization. Aligning Your Entire Organization Around the Information You Reveal  Drilling down into the data your financial reporting provides is only the first step. Step two is putting that information into action. And for many organizations, that means sharing it. Research shows that 87% of CFOs share financial information with at least some of their employees.  Sharing your financial insights can help build organization-wide alignment and increase accountability throughout your company, while enabling individual departments to plan for any operational changes that need to be made. But there are a few things to consider as you get your whole organization involved in your financial numbers:  Be careful what you share. You shouldn’t—and can’t—just release your financial statements organization-wide and be done with it. First of all, not everyone in your company will be proficient at reading financial statements or the data within them. But insider trading rules may also mean you can’t disclose everything in your financial reporting, and privacy concerns will leave financial teams closely considering what they should release (many choose to keep salary information under wraps, for example). Consider both before you go wide. Offer context. Putting the numbers into context will help your employees and department heads understand the value the data brings—and let them see what the story is telling. That’s where the work you’ve already put in comes in handy. The amount of profit your company has made per unit sold, for instance, may be more relatable and actionable for your organization than overall profit, while profitability trends can let departments know where and how to allocate their attention and resources. Fill in the details. Additional reporting—including Department/Cost Center Reports, Customer Profitability Reports, Product Line or Location Profitability Reports and Inventory or Receivables Health Analyses—will allow you to apply the data from your financial reporting in a way that further reveals tangible insights directly applicable at the department and team level. This type of reporting goes a long way in giving departments their own baselines for budgeting and spending. By providing your team with a quality source of data alongside the context they need to put it into action, you’ll help everyone in your company better drive their part of the business. This puts them all on the same path towards optimizing company performance—whether that means making operational cuts or shifts in investment or better planning for growth ahead. In doing so, the data shared in your financial reporting can serve as a lens: helping you pinpoint operational inefficiencies, reduce costs and align your entire business. All of which will lead your organization to a more successful future. 

We just wrapped up our last day of Vena Nation week and what a great week we had! We want to thank everyone for their hard work and amazing contributions to make Vena Nation week such a great experience. Today we had Mark Donovan, President of Kansas City Chiefs, sit down with Vena CEO Hunter Madeley to talk about building winning teams. We also had the The Beyond FP&A Panel, which was CPE/CPD accredited for all those in attendance. That panel focused on how Capstone Infrastructure, the Arizona Cardinals and Vena’s finance pros standardized processes, systems and reporting to serve as strategic business partners. Last but certainly not least, we had Liam Bastick (of SumProduct) walk us through Effective Data Storytelling in Excel. Sadly this is our last day, but if you missed it (or anything else during the week), be sure to check out Plan To Grow in the coming weeks for any missed sessions. Here are  our highlights from day four. Top Talks of the Day #1 How To Build Winning Teams With the Kansas City Chiefs “I look for someone who understands how to be a really good teammate. Someone who understands the importance of hard work across the board.” - Mark Donovan, President of the Kansas City Chiefs #2 The Beyond FP&A Panel “With Vena, our budget managers embraced the change of returning to an Excel based platform because that’s where they were comfortable.” #3 Effective Data Storytelling in Excel With SumProduct “If you are telling a story you can’t assume that everybody knows everything right from the get-go, so you’ve got to give them some sort of recollection.” Hot off the Vena Nation Press Finding Balance: Career and Motherhood Tips From a Modern CFO 3 Reasons Why You and Your Organization Should Be Using Power BI 3 Offseason Planning Tips for Finance Teams in Professional Sports Highlights From Vena Nation Week 2021: Day One Highlights From Vena Nation Week 2021: Day Two Highlights From Vena Nation Week 2021: Day Three Don’t Forget To Join Us on Plan To Grow Stay tuned to check out and enjoy Vena Nation week on Plan To Grow in case you missed it!

We just wrapped up day three of Vena Nation week and it was jam-packed  with some amazing talks and experiences. Our Chief Solutions Architect Rishi Grover gave a talk about the future of data transformation. We got to learn about The Ultimate Excel Shortcuts With Chandoo. This is just a taste of the day we had today, so if you missed it, be sure to check out our highlights: Top Talks of the Day #1 The Future of Data Transformation With Rishi Grover “We’re living in a world where we can bring cross-functional data together and extract real, tangible insights from it with powerful technology solutions.” #2 The Ultimate Excel Shortcuts With Chandoo “If you want to leave with all of this data, you can use a shortcut to select everything you want on your spreadsheet.” #3 A New Era of Storytelling With Jeanne Lam “One of the most interesting challenges is, ‘how do I convince the 200 other people at this company that this is the way to go?’ This is where finance teams and storytelling help everyone understand business decisions.” Hot off the Vena Nation Press 10 Reasons To Attend Vena Nation Week 2021 Get Ready To Be Inspired by Our Vena Nation Week Speakers Excel Nerds Unite in the Ultimate Community Finding Balance: Career and Motherhood Tips From a Modern CFO 3 Reasons Why You and Your Organization Should Be Using Power BI 3 Offseason Planning Tips for Finance Teams in Professional Sports  Don’t Forget To Join Us for Day Four!  We still have one day left to enjoy Vena Nation week and that includes: 20+ talks still to watch live and on demand 2 live and interactive sessions  Don’t forget our influencer sessions with SumProduct on June 18 Plus, Vena customers get access to additional exclusive roundtables and training sessions at Vena Nation week

You’re probably wondering what Excel Nerds Unite is all about. Well, this community came out of Vena’s desire to bring together Excel nerds and enthusiasts alike. We wanted to create a community that celebrated Excel nerd culture. As part of our official launch, we built a dedicated website where Excel nerds and enthusiasts can unite together. The website will continue to grow into a space for Excel-related content—blogs, spreadsheets, Excel memes and puns and more. And Excel Nerds Unite is also part of Vena Nation week, which is our annual virtual conference for finance, operations and business leaders to excel together.  There are some great things you can look forward to that Excel Nerds Unite will be doing as part of Vena Nation week. We’re bringing in two legendary Excel experts to speak on all kinds of interesting Excel-related topics—from new Excel features you just need to know to understanding the importance of effective data storytelling in Excel. Both of our speakers are recognized as Excel MVPs by Microsoft. But wait, there’s more. You can even submit your Excel questions on our Excel Nerds Unite website and they will get answered during Vena Nation week (and beyond that during our yearly Plan To Grow talks). So if you’ve ever been stuck on an Excel problem, now’s your chance to chat with the pros! So with that, why don’t I tell you a little bit about our Excel Nerd speakers who will be with us during Vena Nation Week.  Punra Duggirala aka Chandoo Let me begin by introducing Chandoo. Punra Duggirala, also known by his nickname, Chandoo, holds an MBA from IIM Indore and Computer Science degree from Andhra University. Chandoo is really passionate about data analytics and visualization and has developed a platform for sharing knowledge about Microsoft Excel, Power BI and new ways of presenting data. He loves Excel (possibly even more than we do here at Vena), and for Vena Nation week this year, he’ll be teaching you New Excel Features You Need To Know and The Ultimate Excel Shortcuts to help you become the nerdiest Excel expert. To make it even better, Chandoo will be answering your Excel-related questions, so be sure to submit them before June 15! Liam Bastick aka SumProduct Liam Bastick is a full-time Excel legend and part-time comedian (you’ll see more of the comedian during his sessions). Liam is a chartered accountant and chartered management accountant specializing in financial modeling and strategic advice. He is also the Director of SumProduct, a business providing Power BI to financial modeling services and strategic advice, decision analysis support and training to corporate, banking and service delivery clients nationally and internationally. For Vena Nation week, Liam will be walking you through Creating Effective Spreadsheets in Excel and Effective Data Storytelling in Excel. Stay Tuned for Updates and See You at Vena Nation Week Stay tuned for more updates and all the ongoing content that will be released on Excel Nerds Unite. We’re looking forward to seeing you at Vena Nation week this year. Make sure to check out all the great talks and live and interactive events happening all week long.

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: 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? 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. 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.