Vena Complete Planning Platform

Run! It is not what they tell you in the sales pitches. They are showing highly controlled, vaporware and not real world environments and concerns. They will continually push to upsell support services to fix their open system and implementation issues. They rush you through implementation and leave scoped items undone and completed work undocumented. Vena is sold as a tool with a lot of functionality and flexibility. The issue is that data integration mapping issues, data saving and retrievals run into continuous bugs and errors that are extremely time consuming to trouble shoot and fix. Results in mis-reported BOD slides and management reports before new errors that pop up each month are discovered and a fix attempted. Because each set up is highly unique the support staff can never help as it takes each new support staff days to learn your unique set up and by then they run out of hours or just never solve it. The support is awful by design so they can upsell you a premium support plan as you try and save your large initial investment with a long term agreement to fix the errors in the original implementation and correctly ongoing platform data issues. The CSMs are rarely motivated to help you correct an error unless the fix includes an additional paid support service or hours as they are commissioned on new services sold, revenue generated and not customer satisfaction. Budget managers also found the front end interface clunky and hard to use and the templates error out in the database connection on a regular basis. The system design has major design limitations for basic financial planning tasks. It failed to deliver a stable platform and solution for a typical rolling, monthly forecast and financial reporting. Additional paid Vena support over 3 years never were able to get the rolling forecast stable and tunning smoothly without a myriad of monthly data issues and reporting errors. 4 years in of ongoing Vena support and the cash flow modeling still has unresolved data and calculation bugs making the module and reporting inaccurate. Stay away. The Vena support becomes a money pit and the tool always has a list of ongoing and new bugs to fix. This hat consumes hours of the FP&A staff time and steals them away from value add analysis and business partnering. Your FP&A team becomes less effective with Vena.