Vena vs. Workday Financial Management

Whether you have processes you are looking to make more efficient or starting from scratch, Vena is a great tool to handle both. When we started with Vena all of reporting was either very manual or frankly nonexistent. Vena was pivotal in bringing us from zero to 10 in a short time. it helped us streamline the process of gathering data to the end reporting

Incentivized

Our primary model for budgeting revenue is centered on patient counts. Missed assumptions early in the year result in massive ramifications over the balance of the year. Workday formulas allowed us to write formulas to project the recovery of such shortfalls over a variable length of time, resulting in realistic projections for overcoming said shortfalls.

Incentivized

• What i like best about Vena is that it is very seamless Excel integration.
• Vena fosters collabs across teams, helping multiple members to work together on financial planning in real-time enhancing overall efficiency.
• We now also can automate manual processes like budgeting, consolidation of data and reporting saves my valuable time and also reducing the risk of errors.

Incentivized

• We specically wanted a cloud financial management system that we could use in China and communicate reports to the headquarters organization and roll-up reporting. It performs well.
• It was reasonably priced since we are not a for-profit company and need the Workday flexibility for finance and accounting operations. Most of our requirements are met with this one system.
• The system worked efficiently with the additional security we built on to keep confidential. Many reports are ready off-the-shelf or easy to develop, which is a strength.

Incentivized

• It could improve the ease of implementation; it could take a long for an inexperienced IT team.
• From the ERP system perspective, it can be linked easily, but it has room for improvement when you make core changes and require a Vena specialist again.
• Some administrators can get confused while working on Excel implementation; it has complicated technical requirements.

Incentivized

• The automatic save function isn't always active for the cloud version. I'm not sure if it is a glitch or a settings issue.
• There are some limitations to customizations.
• Updates don't go through properly on the system, leading to downtime issues.

Incentivized

It saves me so much time - to go back I would have to hire multiple people to achieve the same results. It is a cost effective tool for our uses and continues to pay for itself in time savings.

Incentivized

This is split between usability from an end-user perspective and administrative. Administrative - The tool is lacking in a cohesive way to administer the tool, both from more of a back-end perspective (ETL/Integrations, scripting, etc.) as well as from a business administrative (Processes, Models, etc.). On the more back-end IT related aspects, the tool is a mishmash of modules that were clearly developed in stovepipe fashion. Basic feature/functionality aspects such as version control, auto vs manual save, etc. differ between the code preparation components. It is also lacking in any sort of coherent version control. Not all pages display the context information, so extreme caution must be used. There is also no coherent migration strategy. The process and model navigation has been somewhat challenging for our business administrators, often requiring assistance from Vena when creating or altering templates. 2 of 10 End User - This is better. The Excel add-in generally functions well. Creating basic templates is straightforward, and there is a large degree of flexibility when creating reporting templates. Being part of Excel puts many users into a comfort zone. The toggle switch between template and data mode is not well conceived, and the add-in pop-ups occasionally have issues on multi-monitor displays. 6 of 10

Incentivized

Workday Financial Management is an easy to use, productive software suite that really brings all departments together and improved workplace efficiency. Before we began using the software, much info was partitioned in random places that were not clearly labeled or accessible to all shareholders. We are very pleased with Workday Financial Management.

Incentivized

Vena has been available and running. There are notifications well ahead of scheduled maintenance and so far, scheduled maintenance has been occurring during off hours and fortunately has not occurred during a time that is crucial for us to be actively using.

Incentivized

Vena Solutions pages load quickly and only a few times does it get a bit slow, only when there are many integrations and the reports are long. But in general it is always fast and honestly I am very satisfied with the speed in the generation of statistical reports and the pages

Incentivized

From initiate setup to going live, Vena's customer representatives and technicians have proven to be responsive and enthusiastic in getting our company up and running. They have been patient with our questions and frustrations and worked to troubleshoot issues that have come up.

Incentivized

Our support team has been awesome. They are extremely knowledgeable and have been able to guide us through all of the challenges we have faced. Workday's community online is also extremely helpful with many trainings and help topics that can be reviewed at your convenience.

Incentivized

Our initial in person training was a little rough b/c I felt like our trainer wanted to focus on maximizing Vena rather than understanding what we were needing for our organization. He was very responsive and added insights, but could have worked to understand our needs a little better.

Incentivized

The training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.

Incentivized

The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates

Vena Solutions stands out due to its familiar Excel-based interface, making it easy for our team to adopt without extensive training. Compared to alternatives like Anaplan and Oracle Hyperion, Vena's strong customer support and efficient automation have significantly reduced our budgeting cycle time. We chose Vena for its seamless integration with our existing systems and substantial time-saving benefits, ultimately enhancing our decision-making process.

Incentivized

The application data of users in the case of PeopleSoft is stored in its proprietary data storage, whereas Workday Financial Management connects to outside databases to create analytics reports. Therefore, this option uplifts the need to use Workday Financial Management as an interactive tool of business intelligence. The release model of Workday Financial Management is ahead of Oracle because it has a continual announcement of more functionality that is a very attractive incentive for our project management team for improving and developing the ongoing operational streams.

Incentivized

Vena solutios is a software that provides robust tools that help different departments in their statistics and we can visualize a lot of promising and visually attractive data. Vena Solutions' level of scalability is high and sustainable over time thanks to the fabulous technical support that is ready to help us at all times

Incentivized

• Eliminated the necessity to manually combine multiple Excel budget worksheets into one file in order to compile an org-wide budget
• Allows end-users to be self-sufficient by having the ability to drill into transaction-level detail and conduct ad-hoc analyses
• Created more bandwidth in the FP&A team to spend more time on more meaningful analysis

Incentivized

• Workday has helped my employer save money over the past couple of year by tracking time of employees and how long were days looking like.
• It has enables us to make better decisions by hiring more people instead of paying overtime to those who already work in order to have the right work/leisure balance
• The platform has also helped us to redesign our policies after seeing when employees were clocking in and clocking out and track people who were showing up late for work

Incentivized