In many cases, time spent on manual processes within finance can amount to a third or even half of a full-time employee per year. For resource-strapped nonprofits, this can be a huge obstacle in the way of planning and making strategic decisions for the future of their organizations.
On October 30th, 2019, JMT Consulting and Vena hosted an event for New York nonprofit professionals to network and learn how the FP&A tool, Vena, can help organizations recoup the collective time and effort spent on manual tasks, increase collaboration, save on opportunity costs, and mitigate risks found in Excel-based budgeting and planning processes. Here are a few of the key takeaways from the event:
Vena allows you to continue to operate within Excel.
JMT Consulting is very familiar with organizations that have attempted to implement various FP&A softwares, but eventually revert back to using Excel for analysis within a few years. Excel is the ‘safe place’ — the tool many rely on to create models before transferring the results into another system. This transfer of data, though, results in increased manual processes and a greater likelihood of errors.
With Vena, you don’t need to leave this ‘safe place’ to achieve greater workflow management and mitigate risks. This FP&A solution fully integrates with Excel, so your existing processes continue, but with the added benefits of modern-day Cloud technology: security, scalability, collaboration, and control.
In addition, many FP&A tools have a steep learning curve. If the one employee who knows the system leaves the organization, then the investment in training is lost. It could be many months before a new person can be hired and fully trained, leaving the organization operating with a major blind spot. With an Excel based SaaS, there is no prolonged training.
Vena enables you to integrate all of your systems into one centralized database.
If your organization struggles with broken processes and attempting to be efficient across multiple systems, Vena could help by integrating all of your existing systems into one centralized database. A robust process workflow engine that increases collaboration across an organization, Vena makes it simple to assign tasks and track completion status. By decreasing the time you spend collecting and consolidating data, your team is free to allocate more time towards analysis and strategic planning.
Vena simplifies financial processes.
If you are dependent on processes that utilize spreadsheets, are repetitive, and are collaborative in nature, Vena can help. Budgeting, forecasting, reporting, capital project management, financial close, and regulatory reporting can all be automated and streamlined using this tool.
Vena brings organizations greater collaboration and control to nonprofit teams.
Vena is not only a strong tool for finance teams — its secure and scalable design empowers people outside of finance to understand their budget so the entire organization can participate in making effective budgetary decisions.
Vena also provides a visual workflow process with notifications and a clear layout of which users are responsible for completing specific tasks, instructions for completing a task, and the ability to attach supporting documents. With the option to set static or smart close dates, Vena provides freedom to complete projects in as rigid or flexible an environment as your team designs.
Used by 8 of the 10 major banks in the United States because of its security and ability to produce regulatory reporting, Vena has the highest ratings of end-user adoption according to BPM Partners and TrustRadius.
In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, Vena is a particularly strong solution for nonprofits. Its affordability, quick deployment, short learning curve, and adoption rate among non-financial people makes it an ideal solution.
For a more in-depth review of Vena’s robust workflow management functionality, view our on-demand video here.
We’d love the opportunity to learn more about your FP&A needs and how we can help you streamline processes, promote team collaboration, and increase strategic planning for your organization. To chat with one of our nonprofit experts, contact us here.
