FP&A software plays a crucial role in helping CFOs, finance leaders, and FP&A experts maintain the financial well-being of their organizations. It enables them to monitor and analyze current financial outcomes while also forecasting future performance.
Given the wide range of providers offering FP&A software, choosing the most suitable platform for your specific needs can be challenging. That's why, at The Finance Weekly, we put together comprehensive reviews of different FP&A software tools.
In this report, we will delve into all aspects of Vena Solutions, including customer feedback, assessments from software review platforms like G2, advantages and disadvantages, as well as pricing information.
Overview of Vena
Vena is a popular FP&A software solution and has quite a few functions and features. Let's go over a few of them:
Scenario modeling - ability to create multi-scenario financial analysis for better decision-making.
Integrating data sources and native connectors - Integrations such as NetSuite and Salesforce provide native integrations while PowerBI provides a low code solution.
Dashboards - Vena has a navigatable dashboard meant for people accross the organization to access the dashboards. Managers can also build a collaborative workflow.
Vena AI chatbot - Vena Copilot is a new chatbot feature that is not yet rolled out.
Who is Vena Solutions meant for
Vena Solutions is a software tool used for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) that is suitable for medium and large enterprises with large finance teams and huge amounts of data. It is a pre-configured solution using a template-based approach to support growth and streamline highly manual processes. It is meant to be an off-the-shelf solution that suits a wide range of needs but does have customization capabilities for specific use cases.
Vena AI function (Vena Copilot) Review
In April, 2024, Vena announced that it is creating an AI chatbot function. "Vena Copilot" uses natural language to gather data, analyze reports, and answer finance questions. While there is no date yet for its full roll out, it is a feature worth paying attention to.
FP&A chatbots and AI seem to be a race among the leading FP&A software. Datarails and Planful were the first ones to roll out the AI function in FP&A. Datarails has FP&A Genius, a chatbot style AI function that seems similar to Vena Copilot, as well as "Storyboards", an advanced AI function that creates real time dashboards based on the answers.
Planful, another similar FP&A software, has Planful Predict, "a suite of AI-powered solutions that help finance and business leaders make confident, intelligent financial decisions". Although it seems like a helpful tool for finance teams, they don't provide much information about it without asking for a demo and there is not much information or reviews about it online.
Vena Reviews
Vena Solutions was founded in 2011 and has a wide range of customer reviews, with some users praising the software and others criticizing it.
Here is an overview of the ratings from the most common software review sites:
G2 - 4.5 out of 5 stars overall
5 Stars | 170 Reviews |
4 Stars | 61 Reviews |
3 Stars | 3 Reviews |
1 Star | 1 Review |
Trustradius - 8.7 out of 10 overall
9-10 Stars | 151 Reviews |
7-8 Stars | 63 Reviews |
5-6 Stars | 6 Reviews |
3-4 Stars | 3 Reviews |
1-2 Stars | 1 Review |
Capterra - 4.5 out of 5 stars overall
Vena Pros
One Source of Truth - Many reviewers write that the biggest advantage of Vena is that it helps them by providing one source of truth. Vena’s system connects data contributors, analysts, and data consumers, and has the ability to “consolidate across many systems/data sources into one source of truth,” as one reviewer noted.
Upgrading the budgeting process - Budgeting is one of the most time consuming and manual processes in the finance department and fixing the budgeting process is usually one of the top reasons for adopting an FP&A tool. Vena helps in automating and preparing budgets, and customers have reported time saving, accurate, and smoother budgeting processes with Vena.
Time Saving - Vena Solutions saves finance teams lots of time by eliminating the manual processes that existed before. Furthermore, Vena’s software is quite fast, especially in comparison to other FP&A tools where customers report long loading times and system crashes. Vena is reported to “compute data very fast which makes it more reliable in crunch time.”
Vena Cons
Pricing - Vena is an expensive choice when it comes to FP&A software (can run over $60,000 for the first year when taking into account implementation fees). Although it is cheaper than tools that cater to big corporations such as Anaplan and Workday, Vena is best for bigger companies (not SMBs) and the price usually reflects that. There are also additional ongoing fees such as implementation fees and third party support fees which increase the price and make Vena expensive to maintain.
Implementation time - Vena takes longer to implement than many other similar FP&A software that we reviewed. New Vena customers without a high level of technical background report finding themselves needing “IT support” or “3 dedicated engineers” in order to implement. Many users report much longer implementation times than promised, sometimes even more than 8 months to go live.
Built for large finance teams with many resources - Vena, just like other FP&A solutions, is meant for finance teams to be independent after implementation. However, it takes a lot more resources, time, and money to get to the point where you can work on your own when using Vena. Vena’s implementation can be quite daunting, and customers have reported difficulties in independent maintenance as well.
Speed - Speed is another problem that users have reported with Vena. While Vena provides many useful and comprehensive models and templates, they can cause a slowdown in performance and even take 2-3 minutes to load.
Compliance - In addition, there have been issues with Vena’s SOC reports in the past. Last year, a public company claimed that Vena misled them into thinking that their SOC reports were independent when in reality they were not.
Vena Pricing
Vena Solutions does not provide specific pricing on their website. Rather, they have 2 tiers: “Professional” and “Complete” along with special pricing services for non-profit organizations. Vena usually adds on implementation fees and consulting fees as well.
Conclusion and Vena Competitors
Vena Solutions has a big advantage as being one of the 3 main Excel native FP&A software solutions - along with Datarails and Cube. Vena greatly helps finance teams by providing one source of truth and upgrading financial processes, especially the budgeting process. It does have some downsides, namely higher pricing and longer implementation times than similar companies, as well as slow loading times for large models.
Their new AI functions are an interesting development to follow as it may be a gamebreaker when they are fully developed and launched.
Check out The Finance Weekly’s complete comparison of some of the best FP&A solutions for 2024.