Vena Reviews & Product Details

For our business Vena has been one of the most efficient software as it help us in maintaining our financial stability and data related to everyday operations. This is the software that is an advance version of MS Excel and can easily store all the business data in a centralised platform and compile them for a detailed analytics and future planning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The one and only challenge that I face while working with vena was its setup because initially the user interface was too much complex and we did not understand anything so the complete setup has been done with the help of YouTube tutorials and even the professional financial team was not able to do the complete setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vena centers its functionality around Excel, but all your data is securely stored in the cloud rather than within the spreadsheets themselves. Together with excel flags, there is potential to build reports that does exactly what you intend to show. The ability to dynamically expand within models, reports, and templates greatly simplifies the work for those responsible for maintaining them. The cascade feature of reports dynamically runs the report in slices without having to select the slices manually, saving a lot of time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After using Vena for a few years, we have found that most of the challenges we face are related to template automation and ensuring that Mac users can effectively use the platform. We continue to discourage users to access Vena from Mac environment and strictly direct our users to access Vena from Windows environment. It works very well with MS Office, but does not have much integration for GSuite. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Vena daily in my work, and I find it very user-friendly. It has been a great help to both our Operations and Finance teams. We use it to house all of our month end excel sheets that we use for input and uploads that integrates with our Accounting software, as well as for our budget process, and all of our financial reporting on all levels. It was very easy to implement with our Operations team, and customer support was always there if we ran into problems. I value the fact that we have all of our reporting in one place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honestly, I can't think of anything that I dislike about it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to have our financial statements automatically update each month is a huge improvement over our manual excel files. Vena's budgeting/forecasting capabilities are really strong and allows for creating multiple scenarios. Working with Vena is excel allows for all normal excel functionality. We really like the drill in capabilities to go from summary data to expand down to even the transactional level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In our experience, Vena's account reconciliation tool does not match the capabilities of some specialized reconciliation solutions. However, as a relatively affordable add-on, it adequately serves our requirements. Additionally, the ease of implementation largely depends on the amount of effort dedicated to data cleansing beforehand and having a clear understanding of predefined expectations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the ability to render reports fairly automatically and have a consistent look and feel when presenting to our campus budget managers. I do, though, like the introduction of PowerPoint in Vena and we'll be seeing how we might be able to leverage that new tool. The initial setup went very well, and the consultants at Vena were very helpful and prompt in their response times. We were set up and ready to go in short order to begin reporting to our campus. Vena is very helpful in the area of financial reporting and analysis, and all the functionality of Excel presents itself in Vena such that if you know how to use Excel well, then you're far ahead and ready to go to begin using Vena to deploy in your organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think what could be improved is a feature where the intersections that combine into a cell could be more easily displayed as a formula like in Excel so that you can backwards check numbers and tie to published reports just by looking at the consistency of the formulas. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Versatility: Excel interface is reassuring for stakeholders, especially beyond the FP&A team. We have been using Vena for seven years now and we gradually implement new features when they became available. We recently finished the implementation of the accounting close and consolidation modules. We got a great after sales services. Participation to experts' community events also help tremendously to keep abreast with the product development and best practice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is an expert system. The calibration and successful roll out it depend on (Vena) expert ressources. Once it is properly calibrated and tested the internal adhesion should be easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find Vena to be incredibly stable and easy to use, which gives me a reliable feeling when working with the platform. As we handle financial data for a listed company, it's crucial that our tools deliver dependable performance, and Vena excels in this area. I particularly appreciate Vena's hands-on nature and its seamless integration with Microsoft Excel, which makes it an ideal tool for managing and consolidating our financial data effectively. Additionally, Vena has proven valuable for gathering both financial and other forms of data from our various subsidiaries, allowing for efficient consolidation and planning. I've experienced a smooth implementation process with Vena, with no issues during setup, which speaks to its user-friendliness and effective onboarding procedures. Overall, Vena's capabilities and ease of use make it an indispensable tool in our financial management processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find the lack of a real consolidation solution in Vena to be a limitation. Currently, we have to use Vena in conjunction with the Fluence add-on to achieve full consolidation capabilities. It would be more efficient and convenient if Vena could incorporate consolidation rules within the same tool, eliminating the need for an additional add-on and making it a comprehensive solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vena does a great job at organizing your data into a simple database format. Your data can be complex, but with Vena, it's easy to draw it down and organize it into ways that make sense. FP&A is now easier and our processes sped up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The learning curve and more advanced building processes can be tough to wrap your head around at first. Setting up your own template and making mistakes will help you learn sooner as you work with your Implementation manager and the customer support team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For context, we use Vena primarily for our management accounts - we have reports set up that refresh monthly and are where our budget holders access to review their financials as part of monthly meetings with the Finance Business Partners. We also use Vena to forecast quarterly and complete our annual budget

One of the best things about Vena for me is it gives us and our budget holders one source of truth

It also gives us a simple way of monitoring process adherence /completion for our quarterly forecasts and annual budgets

We use a download of Vena data as a data feed in a number of other reports we use across our team - we find it a really helpful data source

It provides a robust audit trail if there are ever challenges about where a number came from / what / who changed a figure

Our staffing allocation process is complex and with help from our wonderful implementation consultant we have got a great process for budgeting and forecasting our staff and all the recharges we do

The Income and expenditure templates that we use for budgeting and forecasting work well for us - they are easy for budget holders to engage with and input into

We find that we can amend and fix stuff without lots of technical skills, adding new users / changing permissions is quite straight forward and the hierarchies/ data structures are logical Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Line item details functionality is overall really good, we love that option to add more detail for an account code but it has also caused us some issues in the past with errors or incorrect summing as a result and we have to be careful to do it correctly when we seed templates with data

We have had some issues with some vena users in our organisation who use macbooks - we find Vena doesn’t work well in a number of ways for them

Loading times can feel a bit slow at times - we do have a lot of staffing data so these templates we understand they take time to load, but more generally at times the opening up of standard templates can be longer than we’d like Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I appreciate how Vena simplifies financial reporting, annual budgeting, and monthly forecasting by allowing easy conversion of information into management-specific templates. It streamlines the sharing of actual data with end users and compiles inputs from users across the company efficiently, providing audit trails for tracking purposes. I find Vena extremely user-friendly, which enhances the overall experience for me and other end users. Its integration with Excel makes the system particularly easy for us to adopt and leverage to its full potential. The initial setup of Vena was relatively straightforward, requiring just a commitment of time, which contributes positively to my impression of the platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes the data or templates can be slow to load, and there is some training involved for admin users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.