Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions provide a complete platform for organizational planning, which is important for all businesses. Understanding their financial status and performance is key for business growth.
A study revealed that inefficiencies in the traditional FP&A role, like manual preparation of P&Ls, balance sheets, and cash flows, lead to an annual economic loss of $6.1 billion. Additionally, a further $1.7 billion in economic potential remains untapped by overlooking growth opportunities in FP&A.
As the FP&A software industry explodes, more and more businesses are looking for tools to help them budget, forecast, and automate their data. Two of these companies, Planful and Vena are popular for many reasons.
Let's take a look into how Vena Solutions and Planful, two leading FP&A software solutions, could provide this essential access to your finance team.
Planful
Planful is a cloud-based FP&A software that empowers finance, accounting, and business users with a comprehensive suite of financial applications. These applications including modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting, and analytics were all designed to streamline business-wide operations.
Over 1,300 customers, including notable names like the Boston Red Sox, Bose, and Five Guys, rely on Planful to enhance their planning, budgeting, consolidation, reporting, and analytics processes. By using Planful, these organizations can accelerate cycle times, boost productivity, and ensure accurate reporting.
At the heart of Planful's offerings is Planful Predict, a suite of AI-powered solutions that enables finance and business leaders to make intelligent financial decisions with greater agility and accuracy. The natively integrated artificial intelligence engine within Planful Predict checks for errors, identifies patterns, and offers intelligent forecast recommendations.
Pervasive across the Planful platform, Planful Predict extends automation, eliminates errors, and enhances decision-making capabilities across the business through features such as Predict: Signals and Predict: Projections.
Key Features
Predict Signals
As a part of the Planful Predict suite of AI/ML capabilities, this tool spots suspect differences and unusual data using AI-driven anomaly detection. It helps you catch errors before it's too late, highlighting potential slip-ups, broken formulas, and financial data mistakes. If something looks off, Predict: Signals will flag it for you to double-check with the team.
AI-driven Anomaly Detection
Identifies risks, errors, and outliers, giving you the opportunity to collaborate, take corrective measures, and progress.
Focus on What Matters
Handles tedious, manual error-checking, so your discussions can concentrate on more critical concerns.
Your Always-on Intelligent Assistant
Examines millions of data points and identifies potential errors, working around the clock to help you achieve more.
Predict Projections
Part of the Planful Predict suite, Projections uses AI and ML to analyze years of data, creating budgets and forecasts that jumpstart your planning cycles with more than just averages. It sets upper and lower guardrails to keep teams on track, avoiding assumptions and copy-paste budgets.
ML-driven Planning Projections
Projections analyzes past data so planning and budgeting cycles can start with an accurate baseline.
Speed and Confidence
Projections uses advanced proprietary algorithms purpose-built for financial data so you can move faster.
Easy Functionality
Projections brings data science into your financial forecasting and budgeting workflows without requiring you to hire a data scientist.
Integrations
Planful provides multiple built-in integrations for connecting data streams into the system, including:
Google Drive
Google Ads
Intuit Quickbooks
Oracle
Workday
Sage Intacct
Workiva
Salesforce
Acumatica
Pros
Planful stands out for its knack to break down data in different ways. You can tweak Planful to fit your needs by creating dimensions that suit your business. Adding new users and customizing their accounts for specific needs is a breeze.
It simplifies replicating reports across various hierarchy levels and automates report generation for all sites, slashing time spent on repetitive tasks. Plus, its drill-down feature is super handy for pinpointing issues with specific accounts or locations. When budgeting, Planful makes things a whole lot easier by letting you create templates that work across all locations, saving you a ton of time.
Cons
The support team could be more helpful, and formatting reports can be a real challenge. Users often face frustrating quirks that just don't make sense. There is a big learning curve when it comes to creating reports in Planful because of the amount of features and scenarios, which can be overwhelming for newbies.
According to reviews, some parts of the platform aren't that user-friendly. Updating things in Planful involves multiple steps, like when you're tweaking a hierarchy, it's a whole process to make sure all areas show the changes. This lack of automatic communication between features can be frustrating.
Pricing
Reach out to them for a customized quote
Vena Solutions
Vena Solutions is a comprehensive FP&A platform designed specifically for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to enhance budgeting, planning, and forecasting. It simplifies these processes by offering advanced analytics, visualizations, what-if analysis, and automation capabilities.
These features enable companies to align their financial goals with their broader business strategies more effectively. It facilitates collaboration across departments during the budgeting cycle through its multi-user access, advanced permissions, and security features, ensuring a seamless and secure experience.
Vena's unique advantage lies in its deep integration with Microsoft technology, leveraging a native Excel interface as its core. This allows users to maintain their familiarity with Excel while benefiting from the advanced functionalities of Vena's CPM software.
For over a decade, Vena has partnered with Microsoft to incorporate leading tools such as Power BI and Microsoft 365, providing a robust and scalable solution for finance and operations professionals. Serving over 1,350 companies, including prominent names like Nike, Coca-Cola Consolidated, and the Kansas City Chiefs, as well as collaborating with over 100 partners, Vena offers a proven and versatile platform for strategic business planning.
While Planful already has advanced AI features in "Predict" and "Signals", Vena announced that they will rollout Vena Copilot, an AI assistant planning feature. Although they didn't give a specific time frame of when it will be available, it's worth it to check it out and see how it compares to other FP&A AI tools such as Planful and Datarails.
Key Features
Effortlessly plan and document various scenarios, such as business growth or changes.
Vena Foundation for FP&A offers tools for financial planning and analysis, including data integration and analysis.
Automate financial reporting tasks to save time, allowing for a greater focus on analysis and insights.
Simplify regulatory reporting and minimize errors.
Predefined templates and reports
Web portal interface to manage source system connections
Extensive range of industry-specific use cases
Integrations
Similar to most comparable tools, the Vena growth engine works seamlessly with standard source systems. Vena Solutions boasts a wide array of integrations. Here are a few examples:
NetSuite
Intuit QuickBooks
Sage Intacct
Oracle
SAP
IBM
Microsoft SQL Server
Salesforce
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Pros
Integrating spreadsheets into Vena is smooth and impressive. Multiple spreadsheets can be tidied up by bringing in cloud data instead of pulling it from the accounting systems. Vena makes handling big data loads for employee reviews a breeze, lightening the load for operations teams.
Vena’s financial reporting provides quick updates and easy access to statements and reports, slashing month-end closing times. By leveraging the latest from Microsoft in Excel and Power BI, Vena gives organizations a full toolbox to tackle all their FP&A needs. Plus, they've got top-notch client-side PD programming and rock-solid customer support for any issues that pop up.
Cons
Vena's way of doing professional services seems to sneak in surprise costs and make the client rely heavily on their team. While these services might seem good at first, they could cause quite a headache if they end up limiting a company’s ability to help themselves and control their own data. For instance, if a project lags and some issue pops up that blocks self-service, clients end up waiting on the Vena support team, leading to more delays.
Here's the kicker - Vena's closed system makes it a hassle to share reports with partners who don't have a Vena license. They can see the reports but can't tweak anything unless the user will copy the values into a different Vena file, making teamwork a bit of a puzzle. Clients have to shell out for more Vena licenses, which isn't ideal for teams who don't use it all the time.
Pricing
Vena's website doesn't display prices upfront, but they've got two main options: the "Professional" and "Complete" tiers, plus special rates for non-profits. They even whip up personalized quotes. Just a heads-up, though - these prices may not include extras like implementation, consulting, or third-party management fees.
Also, the total cost also varies based on the number of administrators, contributors, and view-only users.
Professional
Vena Platform
Customer Success Manager
Standard Support
Customer Portal
Complete
Everything in Professional, plus:
Vena Insights
Premium Support
Sandbox Environment
Expert Managed Services
Vena vs. Planful: Which one is better?
After reviewing both tools, each one comes with their own pros and cons.
Vena wins
Vena seems to be slightly better for SMBs, while Planful is more for bigger businesses.
Vena's ease of use is rated better due to its Excel integration, while Planful takes some time to get used to with all of their features.
Planful wins
Planful already has a host of AI features while Vena still hasn't finished theirs.
Better drill down and more features in general, although they can be a bit complicates.