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.

Maybe you love it, maybe you hate it—or maybe you don’t know what to feel. Whatever the case, like death and taxes, there’s no avoiding it. Corporate budgeting is a key finance function—and a successful budget helps drive a successful business. But whether your company budgets annually or on a more frequent cycle, there’s no reason to dread budgeting season—not if you have the right process in place. The best corporate budgeting process for your company will depend on your organizational culture—and when it’s aligned closely to strategy it will elevate your budget from “something that needs to get done” to a driving force for your business. In fact, when approached in the right way your budget has the power to bring your organization together, connect dots and eliminate silos—putting finance at the heart of everything your company hopes to achieve. Continue reading to explore different approaches to budgeting and how to make your corporate budgeting process a success. What Is Corporate Budgeting? Your corporate budget is key to enabling your business operations and executing growth. When built around your organizational strategy, it’s the tactical side of your business plan, ensuring resources are allocated in a way that sets your business up to operate effectively, meet its growth goals and keep up with ongoing market demands. To accomplish that, a corporate budget is made up of a series of lower-level budgets—including revenue forecasts, expenditures, working capital, cash-flow forecasts, financing needs, etc.—that all roll up into a single master budget. By aligning the budget to your strategic business plan, you ensure it consistently meets the needs of your organizational objectives. And that moves it away from just the administrative task it’s often been considered to become an integral part of your strategic planning process—and part of the operating plan that will drive your business forward to future success. How Do You Align Your Budget? Ideally, the budgeting process for a company begins with a clear view into strategy and objectives. Without that visibility, it’s tough to ensure your corporate budget meets all of your organization’s needs, with the right resources to facilitate programs, people and initiatives across departments. That’s where budget alignment comes in. Aligning your budget with your business strategy and KPI and goal setting is critical to success—and the more your finance team is involved in your business strategy, the more organic that alignment becomes. But even when finance doesn’t have a seat at the table, the best corporate budgeting process will keep them in the loop on organizational strategy and goals. To accomplish budget alignment follow these three steps:   Step Tactics 1. Keep your eye on the long term Expand the budgeting process past a year using strategic budgeting Break down organizational silos with tools such as scenario modeling or zero-based budgeting, funneling your strategic plan directly into your budget Implement technology solutions that make it easier to visualize your budget over the long-term horizon 2. Get your leaders involved early Whenever possible, get finance involved in building ongoing company strategy and organizational goal setting Use data-driven storytelling to frame your budget within a larger narrative of future company success Make the budget part of senior management’s regular routine—not just a single information dump 3. Measure your success and repeat it Choose the right metrics to track and measure to ensure you’re tying your budget to ongoing performance.  Make tweaks along the way based on your results to course correct for market changes and adjustments to your business goals.  Once you’re achieving budget alignment to strategic goals, consider linking budget performance to individual and team performance as well. Corporate Budgeting Best Practices Aligning your corporate budgeting process with your overall organizational strategy is the first best practice of budgeting. But that’s just the start. There are other ways to also ensure you have a successful budget that empowers business growth and helps your departments meet their individual goals. Consider four best practices for making your corporate budgeting process successful. 1. Connect your data Disparate and disconnected data is one of the top challenges faced by finance teams today—and that can become a very real pain during budgeting season. Data is critical to the budgeting process, allowing you to understand what drives performance, what’s contributing to organizational growth and where you’ve found success before, in order to fuel the current budget, predict its future success and make tweaks based on market and industry conditions along the way. So connecting your data and being able to access clean, current data will in itself build a better corporate budgeting process. 2. Consider the past Traditional budgeting uses your past performance and historical data as a starting point to inform your current budgeting process. Historical data is also critical for predictive budgeting and for understanding what drives your business growth. No matter what budgeting approach you take, though, don’t lose sight of that historic view. Comparing actual performance to past performance will allow you to better predict future performance, just like comparing your rolling plan to your longer-term strategic plan will let you see where you need to make adjustments in order to get to your goals. Model scenarios using that past performance data to understand the potential effects of your budgeting decisions. 3. Understand your critical drivers and KPIs Understanding which factors most contribute to your company’s growth will let you know exactly where to allocate your resources for a better chance of success. It’ll also make it easier to model scenarios to understand how they might affect future performance, so that you know exactly where to focus your budget for the best returns. And remember that non-financial metrics can be just as critical to your organizational performance—and your budget—as financial drivers. Non-financial drivers and KPIs play an important role in helping to keep your budgeting process on track, so always ensure they’re in your line of sight too. 4. Stay agile Finally, having some agility built into your budgeting process will empower you to make tweaks whenever the market or your business requires—ensuring you have the resources available no matter what. Budgets are traditionally inflexible, but finance teams today understand that changes are sometimes necessary—whether that means introducing rolling forecasting or a flexible budgeting process, or using scenario modeling to keep you on top of what’s ahead and letting you course correct your budget when you need to. How Do You Prepare a Master Budget? Your master budget is a sum of all of the parts that make up your business, including the budgets of every individual department and every revenue and spending consideration you’ll need to make. The department, program and line(s)-of-business budgets feed into your master budget to inform how resources are allocated company wide. So how do you do that successfully, so that every element of your business is represented in your consolidated budget? Consider some do’s and don’ts for preparing a successful master budget: Objective 1 Don’t budget in a silo Collaboration is key. For your master budget to be successful it’s going to need input from across the organization—from your department managers to your executive team. You’ll rely on them to provide the information you need to determine the people, programs and initiatives integral to achieving your organization’s goals—and to help you decide where resources should be allocated so that every piece of your business is equipped to contribute to its success. Objective 2 Do have a budget calendar Gathering all of those contributions into a master budget requires a detailed budget calendar that will keep it on schedule. After all, getting to the finish line on time means keeping your process—and all of the people involved in it—on track. Missing something or someone could mean a project, program or team doesn’t end up with the resources they need to make your final goals a reality. Objective 3 Don’t lose sight of the data You’ll need a process by which data is handed off between stakeholders, models to be used by each different part of your organization to ensure everyone contributes their unique information and a method to pull everything together. Objective 4 Do measure and report Use your master budget to measure your company performance and ensure you’re allocating resources in the right way. By comparing budget or forecast data with past performance you’ll better understand whether you’re on track with company goals. Preparing a successful master budget, then, is all about people, processes and tools—as well as the data that underlies all of them. By collaborating across teams, having the right processes in place and using technology to connect data from different formats and across sources, you can create a single version of the truth and ensure a connected, comprehensive budget that takes into consideration every part of the business. Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Budgeting Will you start your budget from the top-down or take a bottom-up approach? Most types of budgeting fall into one category or the other. Top-down budgeting is a form of budget allocation, beginning with a set amount and allocating resources accordingly across departments. Senior management creates a budget for the business as a whole, allocating resources to each team according to business-wide objectives and targets for the year ahead. They use past performance and existing market conditions to feed the budgeting process—often with some funds set aside to allow for any final shuffles. Bottom-up budgeting starts at the department level. Individual teams prepare budgets based on their needs for the budgeting cycle ahead, with company-wide objectives shared to protect against siloed requests. Departments present their budgets for approval and the budget committee approves or disapproves line items from there. While neither model is inherently better or worse than the other, they each take a different route to budgeting success—and each have their own pros and cons.   Pros Cons Top-Down Budgeting It’s often built around targets based on your company’s long-term plan Executives get involved early—which means their buy-in is built in It can be more difficult to get departmental buy-in It can create an “if you don’t spend it, you lose it” environment Bottom-Up Budgeting It can be more efficient—and accurate— in terms of how resources are allotted It’s more aligned with departmental needs It can lead to over-budgeting It can take longer to complete (unless aided by the right technology) The best approach for you will depend on your organizational culture and whether teams prefer to build their own ideas from the ground up or let leadership guide them. It may even vary from year to year or from budget to budget, depending on the specific goals your business wants to achieve. Finally, some finance teams choose to approach their budgeting from both directions—with a longer-term plan taking a top-down approach, for instance, and short-term budgeting using a bottom-up model. Zero-Based vs. Traditional Budgeting Zero-based budgeting is one example of a bottom-up budgeting process.   As a way of ensuring your budget remains aligned with current financial performance and priorities, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) makes “zero” its starting line. While traditional budgets rely on your current year’s budget as a jumping-off point for the new year’s budgeting cycle, ZBB takes a different approach, wiping the slate clean every time. With traditional (or incremental) budgeting, certain expenses are fixed, while deeper analysis is reserved for new expenses. This can help to quickly seed your plan, but also means you potentially miss out on changes to your business operations, as well as possible cost savings and investments that might help your organization evolve. ZBB, on the other hand, can promote transparency and a holistic, organization-wide view, while giving departments an incentive to look for potential cuts. Every expense is connected to ongoing financial performance and company goals, and new and ongoing expenses are examined with the same level of scrutiny to see where funding should go. By starting at nothing every time, ZBB makes sure every expense is connected to ongoing financial performance and aligned with company goals—an approach that can have both advantages and drawbacks. Pros of Zero-Based Budgeting It can lead to significant cost savings, giving you new dollars to invest in other places while improving operational efficiency as a whole. It gives your team true visibility into your organization—allowing you to establish stronger leadership and insights. It can make for better collaboration organization wide, as you determine the programs that should be prioritized and how they’ll work together to contribute to company goals. It can make your company more agile, keeping teams on top of every expenditure and goal—and giving them the insight to pivot quickly when needed. Cons of Zero-Based Budgeting It can be more complex and costly—requiring more time from your team to complete. It can take specialized training or operational acumen to do it right. It requires complete organizational buy-in—otherwise it may put other departments on the defensive as they try to justify their programs and initiatives. Without the right metrics to analyze, it can potentially impact departments that offer less tangible results.   With the right organizational culture in place, zero-based budgeting can help you move your planning process and decision making forward. But of course, zero-based budgeting isn’t the only option—there are several ways to approach your budgeting, depending on your goals. Driver-Based and Predictive Budgeting What drivers are influencing your business? And how will your budget empower your long-term goals? Driver-based budgeting and predictive budgeting take those questions and center your corporate budgeting process around them. In doing so, they can help focus your budgeting on the things that matter most—and allow you to remain sensitive to what’s contributing to your organizational success. Driver-Based Budgeting Every business has its own unique drivers—both internal and external. Traffic, demand, interest rates and even—in some cases—the weather outside, can all help drive the success of your business in any given year. Driver-based budgeting (DBB) takes those critical drivers into consideration, tying the drivers most likely to influence performance directly into the budgeting process. By doing so, DBB gives you long-term visibility into how those drivers affect your company’s strategy and goals, using a rules-based approach to focus your budget around strategic objectives and tell a story as to what contributes to your organization’s performance and how. To accomplish that, DBB looks beyond your line items to the data underneath—identifying what’s driving your performance, good or bad, how those drivers correlate with the resources you’re allotting and who’s accountable for them. That goes beyond financial, taking into consideration non-financial drivers too and incorporating them into your budgeting process. It also includes both internal drivers and those external to your organization. Some examples of internal and external drivers include: Internal Drivers External Drivers Traffic Market size Demand Market changes Market share Competitor market share Number of customers Buying trends Sales volumes Interest rates Sale price Regulatory requirements Unlike traditional budgeting, which starts with a line item and works its way backward, DBB begins with an operational driver and ends with its financial outcomes—allowing you to look at the business activities and resource requirements needed to accomplish those goals and directly allocate towards them. In doing so, it links your budget items directly to the people and resources connected to them. A driver-based process can help you align and focus your budget and provide you with insights that let you make decisions more efficiently and keep your executive team informed. But it can also get complicated the more complex your organization is and the more key drivers you have in play—and may mean a shift of focus for your individual teams. Introducing it successfully takes executive support and a clear line of sight to the data you require. But with those in place, DBB can help you open up visibility into company performance—and help you better understand what it’ll take to keep building towards success. Learn about how to apply driver-based budgeting to your business. Predictive Budgeting Often used as a system of oversight, predictive budgeting relies on predictive analytics to aid the corporate budgeting process and help ensure long-term alignment with strategic goals. It often lives outside of your traditional budgeting process, and is used as a way to check yourself and ensure your budget is on track with organizational objectives. Predictive budgeting lets you create intelligent drivers or ranges of possibilities by drawing on broad sets of data, leveraging statistical algorithms and applying machine learning to look into the future—determining potential short- and long-term outcomes through the application of historical data. In doing so, it allows you to better understand your budget’s potential flaws: where it may not align with your organizational goals, when department managers might have added extra padding into their resource requests or opportunities you might have missed to support your business’s key drivers. Predictive budgeting can also help to: Make cash-flow projections and better understand the cash flow needed in the budgeting cycle ahead. Identify your critical drivers and better understand the business activities you can invest in for your optimum financial outcome. Recognize areas of the business that need attention and identify any holes in your budget that might set your plans up for failure. But as the next frontier in planning, successful predictive budgeting relies on a specialized team member or extra training for your existing team to get right. The right data is also critical—including, ideally, at least a few years of historical data—as well as the technology that will allow you to access that data across disparate data sources and apply modeling and analytics to see what the future holds. With all of that in place, though, predictive budgeting can help you build a better budget and layer data-driven storytelling into your budgeting process. It can also reduce inefficiencies and ensure long-term budget alignment with your strategic goals. Rolling Forecast vs. Static Budgeting Just as important as staying ahead of your budgeting needs is ensuring your budget is keeping up with ongoing performance. Rolling forecasting can help with that. By adding and dropping a week, month or quarter every cycle, a rolling forecast always has a view into the future, letting you look 13 weeks, 12 months, four quarters or 18 months into the future at all times—whatever makes the most sense based on the business process or planning outcome to which it's being applied. In that way it differs from a traditional static budget, which is tied to a fixed timeframe. By working on a moving timeframe, rolling forecasts help maintain visibility into recent performance while better projecting future needs, allowing you to remain agile to new trends and requirements while continuing to move the planning horizon forward. This is specifically useful if you’re at a high-growth company, have to make medium- to long-term commitments like hiring decisions or inventory purchases, or need to keep up with an ever-changing industry. But rolling forecasts can also work alongside more static budgets, incorporating elements of both so that rolling forecasts become an extension of your annual budgeting process. They may be introduced as a process of review at regular intervals to keep up with current performance and changing market conditions—or may be applied only to certain areas, like revenue or cash planning, with a more traditional approach used elsewhere. For your rolling forecasts to be successful, consider these six best practices: Always keep your business-wide objectives front of mind. Align your rolling forecast with your company strategy and iterate your forecast as those goals and plans change. Choose a timeframe that works for your business. Match your timeframe to the rate at which your company is evaluating progress and the pace of the industry around you. Make a choice on how granular you want to get. Focus deeper analysis on the drivers that promise to most impact your strategic goals and ongoing performance. Choose the right technology to facilitate your forecasts. Choose a tool that ensures your forecast has the inputs it needs to be useful across your business strategy and KPIs. Incorporate the best data available. Leverage areas where your data is clean, then use forecasting to build transparency and accountability, for even cleaner data over time. Measure along the way to track execution. Use dashboards and visualizations to track execution so that you can see how your forecast keeps up with ongoing performance. Just remember: however you approach your budgeting process, keeping it aligned to your organization’s culture, strategy and future objectives will be key to its success—and your business’s continual achievement. Now go out and build your organization a better budget!  

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. 

Looking for inspiration to navigate your business through a changing world? Or maybe you’re a finance or operations professional seeking to motivate yourself or upgrade your skills to the next level. Well, this year’s Vena Nation week keynote speakers, industry experts and thought leaders have something unique to share with each and every one of you. Our world-class lineup of speakers were carefully selected with you in mind. They’re bringing their industry expertise, best practices, unique perspectives and resilience stories to share so you can learn, ask questions and confidently power your plan to grow. Get all the inspiration you need—right at your desk and in the comfort of your home. Starting June 14, be a part of Vena Nation week to learn something new from every one of our featured speakers. Here’s a glimpse of who’ll be eagerly waiting to speak to you. Darrell Cox Vena’s Chief Financial Officer Keynote Title: The Evolution of the Strategic CFO Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2021 at 10:30 AM ET With more than 15 years of senior leadership experience in finance and business development and knowing firsthand that storytelling is a crucial skill for high-performing CFOs, Darrell Cox has witnessed the evolution of the CFO’s role into chief data storyteller. Prior to Vena, Darrell assembled, directed and managed knowledgeable, dynamic finance teams for Fortune 500 companies such as Virgin Mobile and Rogers Communication. Darrell joined Vena in 2014 at the very early stages of its growth journey. As Vena’s chief finance storyteller, he designs the forward-looking business strategies and long-range financial plans that sustain Vena’s growth.  When it comes to CFO thought leadership, Darrell is one of the finance world’s ardent voices and is frequently invited to share his views at industry events and on podcasts. He has also authored numerous articles on the agile CFO. In his Vena Nation week keynote, he’ll be discussing how the strategic office of finance is evolving to connect the dots across the business to power growth while mitigating risk in an ever-changing world. Rainn Wilson Award Winning Actor, Comedian, and New York Times Best-Selling Author Keynote Title: The New World of Work With Rainn Wilson Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2021 at 10:30 AM ET For nearly a decade, Rainn Wilson endeared himself to millions on the hit NBC sitcom, The Office, earning three Emmy nominations for his portrayal of fan favorite Dwight Schrute, an eccentric paper salesman with big dreams of being #2. As a speaker, Rainn channels the offbeat brilliance behind his on-screen characterizations, showing audiences that creativity isn’t just for artists. It’s for everyone. With notable roles on both the silver and small screen—think Juno, Star Trek: Discovery, Six Feet Under—Rainn Wilson is also set to star in Amazon’s buzzed-about revival of BBC4’s cult classic, Utopia. But acting is just a part of this versatile artist’s creative output: also an entrepreneur, Rainn and two of his friends created the digital entertainment company SoulPancake. Taking a different approach in a web full of negative clickbait, SoulPancake’s slogan—“We make stuff that matters”—really resonates. It’s a positive, uplifting space where people from all walks of life question what it means to be human: a place to connect with the spiritual and creative journey we’re all on. Today, SoulPancake boasts over four million cross-platform fans, spawned the eponymous New York Times bestselling book and presents vibrant live events: putting out timely, topical content with a philosophical twist, no matter the channel.  In his hilarious, insightful talks full of anecdotes and warmth, Rainn touches on subjects he knows well—like creativity, connection, and of course, office culture. How do you inspire employees with different talents and ambitions? What will stoke their creativity? What will suppress it? Rainn proves an amiable guide through the corporate struggles, teamwork challenges, human triumphs and the very real “personalities” that inhabit your world. Relatable and illuminating, he finds universal lessons in the specifics of his fascinating (and sometimes fictional) life. Also an author, Rainn's memoir, The Bassoon King: Art, Idiocy and Other Sordid Tales from the Band Room, details his interesting upbringing, years as a band and drama geek, his time as a struggling stage actor in New York, to his eventual rise to The Office fame—and the spiritual reflection and reconnection that came with it. Called “an unsurprisingly funny and surprisingly poignant entry in the cavalcade of celebrity memoirs" by BookPage, Rainn’s writing perfectly captures his endearing quirks and oddball humor. Rainn and his wife, writer Holiday Reinhorn, also founded LIDÈ, an educational initiative that uses the arts and academic support to build resiliency and empower at-risk adolescent girls in rural Haiti. In his Vena Nation keynote, Rainn will be discussing how creativity and self-expression create a more meaningful and collaborative hybrid work model. Kendra James-Anderson Virtual CFO and Business Owner  Keynote Title: Life and Business Hacks With Finance Femme Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2021 at 4:00 PM ET Could your business use help organizing your finances, gaining clarity and increasing your profits? If so, Kendra James-Anderson is your “right hand”. Together with a team of problem solvers at thefinancefemme.com, a premier financial consulting firm Kendra founded and runs, she helps busy and successful business women take their businesses to the next level. Kendra is an experienced financial planning analysis manager with a demonstrated history of working in multiple industries. She enjoys using her 15+ years of corporate experience, extensive entrepreneurial knowledge and business finance and strategy skills to help small and startup businesses build structure and financial strategies to help them flourish. As a busy mom and business owner herself, she knows a thing or two about how to achieve work-life balance. In her Vena Nation keynote, she’ll be sharing business tips—and the occasional life hack—to help you grow your business and find more time to live life. Jeanne Lam Chief Business Officer (Platform) Wattpad Keynote Title: A New Era of Storytelling With Wattpad Date: Thursday, June 17, 2021 at 4:00 PM ET Jeanne Lam is all about scaling and accelerating high-growth consumer and platform businesses. She loves working in industries that are pioneering a radically different business or technology and growing people and organizations to do what’s never been done  before. With more than 17 years experience across different functions, Jeanne leads tech companies through strategic growth and transition. Currently the Chief Business Officer of Wattpad, the world’s leading storytelling platform used by over 90 million people around the world each month, she is responsible for the global team and strategy that drives user and revenue growth.  Prior to Wattpad, Jeanne led growth and user acquisition at Shapeways, the world’s largest 3D printing service. She also worked at Yahoo as Director of Platform Strategy and at GoPago as Head of Marketing & Business Intelligence. Before her startup career, she spent three years as a management consultant at Accenture. Passionate about helping young professionals find fulfillment in their careers, she’s looking forward to sharing In her Vena Nation keynote address how Wattpad is elevating the voices of authors globally and disrupting traditional publishing industries by leveraging technology. Mark Donovan President of the Kansas City Chiefs Keynote Title: How To Build Winning Teams With the Kansas City Chiefs Date: Friday, June 18, 2021 at 10:30 AM ET With five straight division titles, back-to-back AFC championships and a huge comeback victory in Super Bowl LIV, the Kansas City Chiefs are one of the most dominant teams in the NFL. But Chiefs’ President Mark Donovan knows that helping the organization succeed is about more than just winning football games.  Entering his 22nd season in the National Football League and his 12th season in Kansas City in 2020, Mark Donovan was named the fifth president in Chiefs history in January 2011 after serving two years as the club's Chief Operating Officer. As President, Donovan is responsible for all aspects of the club's business operations and reports directly to Chiefs’ Chairman and CEO Clark Hunt. Catch Mark at his fireside chat at Vena Nation week where he’ll be sharing what he’s learned about finding success on and off the field and how it all starts with building a winning culture organization wide.    Liam Bastick Director of SumProduct Keynote Title: Effective Data Storytelling in Excel Date: Friday, June 18, 2021 at 3:00 PM ET Looking for financial modeling and strategic advice from a global industry expert? Liam Bastick, a fellow chartered accountant and fellow chartered management accountant, has worked in the U.K., Europe and Australia specializing in financial modeling, strategy valuations, M&A and quantitative analysis. He is also an experienced facilitator with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia (ICAA) and a regular presenter with the Certified Practising Accountants (CPA) accounting body. Liam is currently the Director of SumProduct, a business providing financial modeling services, strategic advice, decision analysis support and training to corporate, banking and service delivery clients nationally and internationally. He has also been recognized as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Excel by Microsoft for the past 11 years, one of less than 100 professionals credited with this distinction worldwide. During his Vena Nation keynote, you’ll get to work alongside Liam as he walks you through his tips and tricks on how to master power storytelling in Excel with qualitative and quantitative data. Register Now To Find Your Strength in Numbers In addition to our keynote sessions, Vena Nation week is also jam-packed with live training sessions, peer-led panel discussions, interactive roundtables and more. Register now so you can connect with other business planning professionals and Vena customers, gain insights from your network of peers, unite with other Excel nerds and earn CPE/CPD credits too. 

There’s nothing more certain than uncertainty. Well, besides death and taxes. Uncertainty is a mainstay of the world in which we live. The recent pandemic has both confirmed and compounded this with many countries, economies and businesses struggling to come to terms with the rapidly changing and evolving global crisis. When we look at the effect that the pandemic has had on FP&A, then we can see that the impact has been enormous. Go to drivers have been affected and common data is no longer common. The need to add, change, update and refresh strategy plans, forecasts and budgets is more vital than ever before, with the need for quick adjustments here to stay in the new normal. Businesses have always needed tools to support finance. Paper ledgers evolved to calculators, which evolved to spreadsheets, which evolved to FP&A solutions. But the world as we know it has changed. We’re often finding that history holds as many answers for the future as current thinking. To that end, it’s long been stated that spreadsheets are dead. But with the need for agility is there a better tool? That’s not to say that spreadsheets are right for every process and every use case. Countless businesses have seen issues with spreadsheets and it doesn’t take a huge search of the web to find countless statistics on failed projects, spreadsheet errors and reasons why spreadsheets should be ditched as a modern tool for business. That’s part of the reason we’ve seen FP&A technologies emerge as a solution to remove the chances of data errors. And it’s not a bad thing that technology has evolved in this way. Many businesses now use FP&A solutions designed to be rigid and process orientated to ensure data integrity and regulatory compliance.  Unfortunately, this can mean that modern FP&A tools have lost their ability to be flexible and agile. It’s no surprise, of course, but in an uncertain and volatile world, how do businesses effectively plan, forecast and analyze these rapidly changing and evolving markets with tools that don’t cater to flexibility? Through a third way— a way in between the rigidness of inflexible FP&A tooling and the unbridled spreadsheet. It’s a way in which the spreadsheet is used as the front-end user interface while linking to an application that adds the controls, power and security that’s required. This way isn’t new, it’s why Vena exists. Let’s look at why this third way is viable. By using the Excel interface for the user, it’s simple to add columns, format, change layouts and use other elements that make spreadsheets so popular. Not only does this enable the flexible, agile management that’s required in an uncertain world, it also gives people cognitive comfort. It allows users to do their best work because it’s well recognized that humans will rarely perform at their peak when they’re forced to work within someone else’s constraints rather than their own. At the same time, this third way allows controls to be applied to the data thus enabling the business to retain ownership of what can be modeled or updated. It enables larger data sets to be integrated from multiple systems while also adding powerful functionality for the FP&A process. The outcomes for the business and FP&A function are enormous. To be able to have a controlled environment that enables rapid changes to models, forecasts and plans is a must- have when looking at the new normal way of operating. And it doesn’t stop at finance because if the interface is the spreadsheet, then businesses can use the third way throughout all areas where spreadsheets are currently used—HR, manufacturing, sales—the possibilities are endless. So, the third way is a win-win solution because businesses get the best of both worlds—a controlled environment like Vena that also leverages Excel. In other words, businesses get to have their cake and eat it too. And who doesn’t like cake?

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. 

If a literary author sees the value in using Excel to keep track of more than 150 characters, just imagine what CFOs and their teams could do. The story of how a U.S. president coped with the sudden death of his son, Lincoln On The Bardo may not be the kind of escapist reading that CFOs and other business leaders would turn to in their downtime. You don’t have to love George Saunders’ novel, however, to appreciate the process he took to create it. Based on true events in the life of the late Abraham Lincoln, Saunders’ book has been receiving major accolades for its engaging storyline and believable characters. Most of us would probably find creating this kind of serious literature a little intimidating — which makes it a comfort to know he turned to the finance professionals’ most valuable tools when he wrote it:  Of the 166 different voices in the book (he knows the exact number; “I made a spreadsheet”), not all are fictional. “I thought, to do ghosts all the time was not going to work,” Saunders remembered. “It’s almost like there’s too much control in the writer’s hand, since the ghosts can do anything.” In a certain way, there are actually some similarities between the way an author like Saunders works and how performance management software is changing the way companies operate. The work of any novelist is grounded in some kind of essential, single version of the truth. Exactly how factual and well-researched that truth is depends on the writer, of course. An even bigger portion of the novelist’s task is to imagine possibilities and let them play out on the page. The Task For CFOs Now think about the way companies use data — the kind of information that was once locked in spreadsheets but can now take on a new life by (for example) connecting them to a central database and automating the data collection process. The task for the CFO (and his or her team) is to then imagine possibilities based on what the data tells them and let them play out on the page. Or in the board meeting. In both cases, spreadsheets are a highly effective way to organize information so that the creative, imaginative work can happen more readily. This is where you and your team should be spending your time – not copying and pasting numbers from cell to cell. A recent article on Adweek, for instance, explored how ad agencies are starting to make use of artificial intelligence (AI). One of those interviews suggested that job security will depend on embracing machine learning and leaving the past behind. “If your job is really to move numbers around a spreadsheet and optimizing it based on what’s performing, the computer is going to be way better than you and faster,” the article said. Too often we forget or overlook that spreadsheets are not just places to move numbers around but to move knowledge forward. Excel may always be more of a mainstay among enterprise finance departments than novelists, but there’s no end to the novel ways you can use them to your advantage. The post A Novel Use of Excel Spreadsheets to Inspire Finance Departments appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.