Vena takes the best of Microsoft Excel
and wraps it in the security and power
of an enterprise FP&A solution,
allowing business professionals to budget, forecast, report
and perform analysis in an environment that’s already familiar.
From small organizations, to growing market players,
to international industry leaders,
Vena is designed to suit the size of your business right now
and scale with you as you grow.
Today, let’s explore how Vena can help
shorten the budgeting cycle for Supercorp.
Supercorp’s a growing company.
Their products and services are selling well,
and customers are coming back for more.
Life is good for Supercorp…
until budget season comes around.
Like many companies, Supercorp’s budgeting process
involves sending out an Excel template
to department heads and other decision makers.
And everyone does their best
to complete their budgets accurately and on time.
But when their completed files
start flowing back in to the finance department
well, life starts getting… a little chaotic.
To be fair, Supercorp’s on the right track.
Everyone does love Excel;
in fact, 84% of companies that replace Excel
for their FP&A processes
actually end up reverting back to Excel over time.
But what’s missing is a way to cut down
on the frustrating, tedious tasks
that stretch out budget cycle time
and take away from value-added work,
like performing variance analysis
and building out what-if scenarios.
That’s where Vena comes in.
Vena takes the best features of Excel
and wraps them in an enterprise FP&A solution,
with security, control, a centralized database, and more.
End-users get to keep using the familiar environment of Excel,
but the data can be accessed anywhere, at any time,
fully integrated for input, reporting and analysis.
If a contributor needs to make revisions,
those revisions will update in the database automatically
and the changes can always be audited.
Let’s go through the budget process again.
But this time, with Vena helping Supercorp to work the way they think
Frank Smith, in Supercorp’s Department 101,
has just been notified that next year’s budget is ready for his input.
When Frank logs in to Vena, he sees his Task Workspace,
and notices that there’s some work for him in the To Do section.
He clicks on Department 101,
and receives a collection of templates that he needs to complete,
including a Non-Labor Expense Budget.
From here, Frank can select which fiscal year budget needs to be updated,
create what-if scenarios, or simply load the budget for input.
He can also choose between desktop Excel or online Excel.
Today, he’ll input the budget using desktop Excel.
Supercorp has opted to use a pre-built
best-practice budgeting template from Vena.
But if Supercorp wanted to use their own existing Excel templates,
Vena could integrate and automate them as well.
Data is populated based on each user’s security permissions,
so in this case, Frank only sees numbers related to his own department.
Now, Frank’s working in the familiar environment of Excel,
but with the addition of a Vena menu on the right.
From here, Frank can insert or remove line item details,
drill down into actual transactions from his source systems,
add comments for more clarity, and insert additional files,
like an invoice or a receipt.
Later on, Supercorp’s finance team
can use these same tools to view transaction history,
audit changes within the document, and view commentary for additional context.
Frank’s unsure of exactly what’s going to
make up his advertising budget.
So he jumps over to the Scratch Pad tab
to double-check some data.
The Scratch Pad is a sandbox for free-form modeling,
additional calculations, and any other functions
a contributor might need to make before saving numbers into the budget.
Frank adds a PDF for supporting documentation,
and then uses a standard Excel formula
to reference the numbers from his Scratch Pad
and insert them into the Advertising cells of the live budget,
along with a note for the finance team.
Once he’s done, he’ll save his budget back to the database.
This template will retain all of Frank’s formulas,
comments, and free-form models, so Finance always has context
for how those numbers came to be.
So now, instead of a bunch of Excel files
being emailed back to headquarters,
the budget data for each department
flows back to a central database through a master template,
automatically aggregating for powerful reporting and analysis.
But Supercorp’s CFO, Sarah, is super busy.
She doesn’t always have time to analyze individual budgets.
So when she logs in, she sees a series of dashboards
that allow her to quickly view analytics, exceptions, anomalies and trends
for all of Supercorp’s operating divisions.
If she wants to dive deeper,
she can access a report package to view
any department or division’s financials.
Today, she opens an Expense Variance Analysis report from Frank’s Department 101.
From here, she can easily compare
Department 101’s expenses by month and year, across any set of scenarios.
And if she wants to do some quick analysis herself,
she can open the Ad-Hoc tab to quickly slice and dice this data.
Before moving on to her next project,
Sarah decides to get an overview of how the
whole company is handling the budget process.
She opens the online Status Tracker
to quickly visualize which budgets are complete,
which ones still need to be done, and who’s responsible for them.
Supercorp is used to budgeting nightmares.
But why dread budgeting season when there’s a better way to get it done?
With Vena, the finance team, and every Supercorp department,
can keep using the best of Excel within an enterprise solution.
Contributors like Frank can create and modify their budgets
in a familiar environment, while CFO Sarah and her finance team
get to spend more time focusing on review, analysis,
what-if modeling, and other value-added work.
Suddenly, everyone’s feeling pretty good about year-end.
Budgeting’s a lot better when you’re
working the way you think, wouldn’t you say?