When you’re building out or updating your company’s annual budget, getting feedback from cross-functional stakeholders is a crucial part of the process. Regardless of whether your finance team uses a top-down or bottom-up approach, non-finance contributors will always have to make their own budget inputs.  Vena 365 Connect makes budget inputs a lot easier thanks to a refreshed user interface for contributors from across your business. We’ve improved Vena’s usability so you can collaborate with every department and deliver more reliable budgets— but without all the manual effort. In this article, we’ll walk you through the new contributor experience in Vena 365 Connect. But first, let’s make it clear what Vena 365 Connect actually is, with some context regarding why we even launched these updates in the first place. What Is Vena 365 Connect? Vena 365 Connect is a Complete Planning platform that brings business data from across your organization into a secure, cloud-based environment. It’s a more user-friendly version of Vena that integrates with Microsoft 365, which means Excel users on both Windows and Mac can create reports and distribute budgeting templates seamlessly. Why Did We Launch Vena 365 Connect? We launched Vena 365 Connect for two primary reasons: To ensure Mac users aren’t limited in their use of our solution.   To provide budget contributors with clearer instructions and context around how they should be executing their budget inputs in Vena. If you’re an existing Vena customer, you already know that our platform leverages a native Excel interface. But you also know cross-functional budget contributors may not be as Excel-savvy as you are—so that’s why we’ve updated the experience with a simpler, more user-friendly interface. See for yourself below! How Vena 365 Connect Makes Budgeting Easier For Cross-Functional Contributors In addition to the new Mac compatibility, the most noteworthy feature of Vena 365 Connect is a slick new sidebar contributors can see when they work on a template.  Let’s say, for example, that you’re a marketing manager updating your advertising budget. This is what you would see when you open the OpEx template for your marketing department in Vena:   The sidebar is divided into three distinct tabs: Each of these sections provides a simplified set of functions your contributors can take advantage of as they prepare their budgets for review and approval. Keep on reading for a full breakdown of each one. 1. Instructions and Documents Make It Clear What Contributors Need To Work On As you open up your marketing department’s OpEx template, everything you need to do is laid out clearly in the Instructions and Documents section. Admins can make the instructions as simple or as detailed as they need to, but they’ll always be displayed here to avoid any confusion for contributors. This is what you would see when you look at the Instructions and Documents tab in the marketing OpEx template:   As you can see, the marketing manager needs to submit all their budget inputs for review and approval. Now it’s time to show you what that looks like with Vena 365 Connect.  2. Data Input Tools Make Adjusting Line Item Details Simple When you open up the Data Input Tools tab, you’ll have the option to add or remove line item details from your budgeted values. So if you need to make a distinction between print and digital spends in your total advertising budget, all it takes is a couple of quick clicks.   Once you’ve saved those inputs back to Vena, the new numbers will be applied across your dataset automatically—ultimately sparing you the hassle of copying and pasting those values yourself. Admins will then be prompted to review your work before it’s finalized.  3. Data Analysis Tools Tell the Full Story Behind Each Number Once your contributors have submitted their budgets for final review, managers can use Vena’s Data Analysis Tools to uncover the story those numbers are telling them. Let’s say you see a particularly large value somewhere and you need to know where it came from. The Drill Saves function brings up an audit trail so you can see exactly who made the input and when—giving you 100% visibility into everything that’s happening with your numbers.    You can also see the individual transactions that roll up to any value with the Drill Transactions function in Vena 365 Connect. The data you’d see here depends on the hierarchy structure in your data model, but all member values would be displayed in a separate Excel tab.  This is really helpful for explaining discrepancies or variances to your management team, because all the context you’d need is available with the touch of a button. And when you always have reliable data at your fingertips whenever you need it, you’ll always be well-equipped to lead your business in the right direction. Experience Vena 365 Connect in Action Vena 365 Connect is now available to everyone—but only if your team is already using Microsoft 365. To learn more about our platform and to see Vena 365 Connect in action, just check out the link below and take it for a spin yourself! (Current Vena customers can click here to ask your CSM for more info.)

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.

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.

Climate change, an exploding housing market, and the aftereffects of the pandemic are all contributing to unpredictability in insurance markets. With potential economic stresses putting a strain on capital reserves and liquidity, insurers are under pressure to deliver for stakeholders and consumers. “Optimizing cost structures and strategically prioritizing investments” is critical write analysts in EY’s 2021 Global Insurance Outlook.   Unfortunately, many insurers are not as prepared as they could be. A recent Deloitte global insurance outlook survey found that 79% of industry executives agreed, that “their insurer has been challenged to plan for and invest in targeted areas where they can have a competitive advantage post-COVID-19”. However, only 25% believe their companies have a “clear vision and action plan to achieve financial resilience.” Now that insurance firms have survived the pandemic, they must pivot to thrive.  To thrive, you must have clear insight into your finances and make mission-critical decisions driven by real-time, continuously updated KPIs. This is where an insurance dashboard can really help.  What Is an Insurance Dashboard? KPI dashboards provide instant and real-time access to all your critical financials. They deliver both raw data and visualization, reporting, modeling and analysis, providing you with a clear view of your numbers and deeper insight into those numbers.  But insurance dashboards are only as good as the financial KPIs they include. While some data is intriguing, it might not be informative. You don’t have time to waste on interesting data that provides little insight into your company’s financial situation or fails to inform company strategy. Focusing on the data that provides you with an understanding you can leverage is crucial to your growth and success. Here are 15 financial KPIs every insurer should be including on their metrics dashboard.  1. New and Renew Gross Written Premiums Tracking written and earned premiums provides a clear picture of past, current and future revenue in the short term. This is a critical component for assessing your revenue and plotting future growth. This metric should include: Gross written premiums which are your total premiums before deductions for reinsurance and ceding commissions. These premiums are not necessarily collected premiums, but rather the gross policy premiums you have contracted with clients. These gross earned premiums  account for the revenue you’ve already earned or the expired portion of the insurance contract. Ceded written and ceded earned premiums that you’ve contracted out to other insurers.  Net premiums which provide insight into how much of your premium revenue your company will get to retain for the risks you assume as an insurer.  Unearned premium reserves can tell you, at a glance, how much you would lose if all outstanding contracts were canceled.  2. Losses and Loss Ratios Losses and loss ratios allow you to estimate losses and determine the size of your loss reserves. The gross insured losses you have accumulated, ceded incurred losses and any adjustments you make to your loss reserves should be tracked to provide comprehensive insight into actual and potential losses. Loss ratios will show you how your premiums stack up against your losses and tell you how these numbers are trending in real time.  These KPIs should also include your gross incurred losses or the total amount of paid claims and loss reserves at any given time. Finally, your ceded ratio—ceded insurance balances measured against policyholder surplus—will help you visualize just how reliant you are on others assuming your portfolio risks.  3. Commission Rates  These KPIs help you identify top performers in sales, but you can also use these numbers to compare against industry averages for similar businesses.  4. Ceding Ratios  This KPI provides insurers with a clear understanding of their risk related to reliance on ceded or reinsured policies. You can see just how reliant you are on ceding policies and whether you are too dependent upon a single reinsurer for your portfolio of ceded policies.  5. Ceded Recoverables Also known as reinsurance recoverables, this KPI helps you understand how much reimbursement you can expect from your contracted reinsurance companies. This can include paid and unpaid losses and loss adjustment expenses, such as amounts you may receive for unsettled or unreported claims.  6. Average Weighted Commission Strategizing for the future involves both actual and projected numbers. Average weighted commission rates apply calculations of the estimated chance of closing opportunities to all of your open opportunities, helping you understand what you stand to earn from potential sales opportunities.  7. Net Claims Change in Case Reserves Case reserves are an estimate for the amount that you can expect to pay for a specific claim. Underestimating or overestimating case reserves can pose problems for insurers, so having eyes on the net claims change in case reserves is critical.  8. New Policy Applications As a measure of sales growth, this KPI informs you, at a glance, exactly how many potential new sales you have in the pipeline. 9. Number of Renewed Policies   In addition to new policy applications, you will want to monitor the number of policies renewed by existing clients. This KPI is a good indication of customer experience.   10. Decline Rate This KPI tracks the number of rejected claims and rejected policy renewals against the number of received applications and renewals and presents it as a rate.  11. Average New Policy Premiums  An informative and easily understood KPI, this metric illustrates the average premium rates for new policies sold over a period, such as per quarter or annually, and is key for strategizing growth. 12. Policies for Renewal How many policies have reached expiration and are eligible for renewal is a critical KPI to track for informing sales and customer service initiatives and decisions.  13. New Business Premium  This is the premium acquired from new policies for a specific amount of time. It’s a way to measure and track expansion or growth and the potential for scale.  14. Renew Retention Ratio This KPI tracks the ratio of policyholders renewing policies to those who opt to end their contracts. This is another excellent measurement of customer satisfaction.  15. Quota Share Ceded Premiums Another indicator of risk exposure and potential profit, quota share ceded premiums KPIs provide you with a measurement of the premiums you can expect to retain from your reinsurance agreements.  Track the Right Metrics  Making data-driven decisions is a key success indicator, but it can be a challenge to know what to focus on with the wealth of available data. Tracking the right financial metrics is crucial to the success of your insurance business, helping to maximize output, fuel growth and ensuring that you pivot, when needed. It’s also critical to providing shareholders and other key stakeholders with the visibility they demand. By focusing on key metrics or KPIs, you will have access to effective and efficient mission-critical data when you need it. 

According to our CFO Darrell Cox, in order to be a great CFO, you need to be action oriented and growth minded—proactively looking for insights and leading the change by driving forward-looking business motions. In this blog, we highlight Darrell’s Evolution of the Strategic CFO and his five key principles on being an agile CFO for your business.  Being an Agile and Strategic CFO According to Darrell, being an agile CFO means maximizing your organization's success by mitigating risk during down times. As most organizations experienced during the pandemic, it’s important to have a plan, but as Darrell highlights, the ability to move quickly and make a change if the plan doesn’t benefit the business is important. “Your plan is going to be wrong one way or another as you introduce risk. Agile planning is operationalized across the business to achieve short-term goals and longer-term outcomes. It's not just a budget, it's a process. It enables the company to move and maneuver to make changes around them.” In case you missed Darrell’s talk at Vena Nation week, he highlights his 5 principles of the agile CFO, which takes a lot of influence from his original 7 Principles of the Agile CFO. His 5 principles represent a shorter methodology for agility. The principles leverage the term “agile” as an acronym that describes the different steps of becoming an agile CFO, which are reflected below: The 5 Principles of the Agile CFO: 1. Act and drive action. The “a” in agility represents acting quickly and driving action. It means having a positive impact as a leader and always thinking about how and when you say or do something with your team so that you achieve your desired result. 2. Grow and think big. The “g” represents growing and thinking big. Darrell highlights that when you think about setting something up or analyzing something, ask yourself, are you learning from it?  3. Iterate and plan forward. The “i” represents continuous iteration and planning ahead. As Darrell points out, a CFO does not focus on one single budget, but many small connected plans that lead to an ultimate objective. 4. Leverage technology. The “l” represents leveraging technologies that assist in the day to day. Technology can really enable leaders to amplify their impact. 5. Engage, align and enable. The “e” represents engaging, aligning and enabling teams. Darrell points out that it’s important to engage your audience so that they become aligned and are enabled to achieve and be the best that they can be. It’s also important to be approachable and human in our role. It means being a great storyteller in order to get your team working together and moving forward as one team. Be the Best Agile Leader That You Can Be As Darrell put’s it, being the best agile leader that you can be means thinking big and not just focusing on the details. A strategic and agile leader needs to be finding clues in the details about how to drive a great business. As business and operations professionals it’s important to be agile and proactively looking for insights and changes, so that you can continue to drive your business forward.

As part of Vena's birthday we created a timeline for you to enjoy, check it out: A Decade of Planning To Grow: Milestones and Highlights from Vena’s First 10 Years As we celebrate Vena’s 10th birthday, it’s time to look back and reflect on the growth we’ve accomplished so far. This is how Vena evolved from a three-founder startup in 2011 into a cloud FP&A leader with 900+ customers in 2021. April 2011: Longtime friends Rishi Grover and George Papayiannis launch the company. They begin building the software out of George’s parents’ basement.  August 2011: Don Mal joins as the CEO and third co-founder. Vena is officially born! December 2011: After building the original product, refining the go-to-market strategy and hiring some early employees, Vena brings on First Wind Energy as its first customer. June 2012: George and the Product and Technology team launch the first version of Vena’s OLAP financial database, ultimately laying the foundation for long-term growth and innovation. October 2012: Vena moves its office to Islington and Bloor in Toronto after raising $3 million in funding from close friends and family. This also included an angel investment from a PE firm, Klass Capital.  2013 - 2015: The sales team continues to shatter its revenue and customer acquisition targets. Vena signs some huge clients including Nando’s, McDonald’s Canada, Santander and Kobo.  July 2014: The Product and Technology team successfully transform Vena from an on-premise application into a cloud-based SaaS solution. July 2016: Vena secures its first major funding round, a $30 million Series A investment from Centana Growth Partners. May 2017: Hundreds of customers and prospects gather in New Orleans for VenaNOLA, the company’s first-ever user conference. September 2017: More customers + more employees = the need for more space! Vena moves offices again to its current global headquarters at 2 Fraser Ave. in Toronto’s Liberty Village.  December 2018: Vena caps off yet another record-breaking year with enhancements to the modeling, workflow, integration and data mapping features. January 2019: JMI Equity leads a $115 million funding round as Vena continues to attract top-tier talent and grow its market share.  August 2019: Don steps down as Vena’s CEO as the company begins to adopt a more targeted product-led growth strategy. SaaS veteran Hunter Madeley takes the helm as CEO as Vena begins to prepare for a period of aggressive expansion. May 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic sparks the birth of Vena Nation week, a fully-virtual conference for the entire finance and operations community. Vena unveils Plan To Grow™ shortly after, an innovative online learning hub and CPE-accredited content platform. November 2020: Vena launches the Vena Preview—its first product-led growth initiative—and begins work on additional enhancements to drive demand for the business. February 2021: Vena forms a partnership with the Kansas City Chiefs in order to champion digital transformation in the sports and live entertainment industry. Vena also launches pre-configured solutions for SaaS, banking, education and other key market segments. April 2021: Vista Equity Partners leads another $300 million funding round, giving Vena the momentum it needs to continue thriving for the next decade and beyond. May 2021: Vena’s Product and Technology team prepare for major releases including Vena 365 Connect and embedded dashboarding with PowerBI.

Here at Vena, we love Excel and we know you do too. So we partnered with Excel MVP Punra Duggirala, also known as Chandoo, who is passionate about data analytics and visualization. Chandoo has developed a platform for sharing knowledge about Microsoft Excel, Power BI and new ways of presenting data. We also partnered with long-time Excel MVP Liam Bastick, who is the Director of SumProduct and also a chartered accountant and chartered management accountant specializing in financial modeling and strategic advice. Both of these Excel experts offer their latest best practices, tips and tricks around Excel. When you work with Excel on a daily basis, there’s always room to grow and learn more. Read on for our top three Excel best practices for building effective spreadsheets to save you time and keep you  organized. 1. Always Follow the CRaFT Principles While Building Spreadsheets The CRaFT methodology comes from Liam Bastick and refers to the four key principles for building effective spreadsheets. CRaFT is actually an acronym and each letter represents a specific principle to follow while building your spreadsheets. Consistency  The “C” refers to consistency, and as Liam points out, it means that when spreadsheets are built with consistency in mind, they should be incorporating pre-defined formats and styles in a coherent way. So for example, this means ensuring all formulas are copied uniformly across ranges and also presenting periodic data and formulas in columns consistently, establishing similar structures for similar spreadsheets. Consistency allows for fewer mistakes, promotes model integrity and makes it easier for developers (and users) to understand models quickly. This also makes it easier when you are collaborating with other team members and need to generate and update reports quickly. Robustness The “R” refers to robustness, essentially that models need to be free from errors, mathematically accurate and readily auditable. Liam points out that this principle is key since it keeps models simple, consistent and transparent for you and your team. You and your team can work efficiently since there are established formulas and no hidden macros. Flexibility The “F” refers to flexibility and reminds users that all models should have the structure to provide invaluable “what if?” scenario analysis. Keeping spreadsheets flexible saves you and your team valuable time later if an analysis needs to be conducted. Transparency Lastly, the “T” refers to arguably one of the most important principles—transparency. Spreadsheets need to be clear, concise and cohesive so that others can understand them when working collaboratively. According to Liam, modelers should create their calculations and output in a user-friendly way. 2. Use Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts To Save Time According to Excel wizard Chandoo, leveraging keyboard and mouse shortcuts while using Excel is key to saving time and minimizing stress (especially when working with large data spreadsheets). In fact, he highlights how getting around spreadsheets easily and quickly through keyboard and mouse shortcuts allows you to keep data prep and clean up in mind when designing your spreadsheet. The easier a spreadsheet is to navigate using shortcuts is really dependent on how you set up the spreadsheet from the first step.  That’s why it’s important to put the time and effort into designing your spreadsheet effectively first (see step 1 above). As finance and operations professionals (and even outside of that), you’re probably leveraging Excel and navigating through different sets of data. Leveraging shortcuts not only saves you time, it helps you get around your spreadsheet in a smarter and more efficient way. For example, to navigate through your spreadsheets quickly and easily and to get to a specific point within a spreadsheet, select the end key and any arrow on your keyboard to bring you to the last cell of a sequence in the arrow's pointing direction. 3. Tell a Story Through Your Spreadsheets Telling the right story with your data is key to informing your teams on the latest business updates and making changes if and when necessary. We’ve highlighted how going beyond the numbers to shape a powerful narrative with your data is an important skill for finance leaders to master. According to Liam, it’s important to have a narrative in mind while building out your spreadsheets in Excel. In Liam’s experience, he has found that building a narrative into your spreadsheets and data has been shown to increase comprehension, interest, engagement, recall and it also eases the comprehension of data when it’s been reviewed. As Liam says, “The importance of good storytelling is that it’s not all about one thing.” This is especially true when you’re working with budgets and organizing them through Excel reporting. Liam also argues that when it comes to any kind of report building, “understanding one-offs is critical to understanding business performance and setting financial statements. You’ve got to maintain a register of the one-off items, both positive and negative, for the current and prior periods to see the actual trends.” This is key to managing both on a day-to-day level as well as strategically for the long term for any team. The Power of Excel Whether you’re a finance professional or business leader, you’ve probably leveraged Excel in some capacity. Maybe you need to build a budget report, create a financial forecast or just organize your team's vacation time. Excel is so powerful for your day to day and Vena is the only Complete Planning platform that combines enterprise-class functionality with the comfort, flexibility and power 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. The point being is that Excel is an integral part of the day to day for most teams and it’s a tool that helps keep us organized and working efficiently.

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. Missed Vena Nation Week? Check out all the Vena Nation week sessions on Plan To Grow, and stay tuned for more updates and all the ongoing content that will be released on Excel Nerds Unite. Make sure to check out all the great talks and live and interactive events we had during Vena Nation week this year.