Vena vs IBM Planning Analytics: Which is a better fit?

Soumya: Hi, my name is Soumya. I'm a financial analyst at Achievement Network, and I give Vena a score of three out of five. We were using a combination of Google Sheets and Excel to build our models and present our reports to our C-level executive. We chose Vena to have a single source of truth where we can bring in our actuals data, compare it against the budget that we would have set in one time in the year, and we would have a source or a tool where we can forecast throughout the year. And Vena is also a great tool to report on. So we would share the Vena license with our C-level executives, and they could open their financials any point in time, any day, and view their financials live. Vena is also a cloud-based platform, so all our data could be stored in a cloud platform and there was no need for a desktop version, and so the single source of truth could be maintained for everybody. The implementation process was pretty easy and very quick. The Vena company itself, they provide a learning platform and a consultant who can help you ramp up into learning the platform itself and how to model in it. So it's a pretty easy process and it took about two, three months of implementation. Vena is a tool that's better suited for a small-size company, small to mid-size company. It's also very suited to a nonprofit or academia-based company, and that is how the company markets the product itself. It has some issues with scalability, and hence the recommendation to stay within the mid-range size as a tool. Another thing to note would be that it's a great tool if you want to bring it in-house and model yourself, and if you want to have your analyst learn the platform and build and integrate and all of those things. If you bring in a third party consultant itself, it can get pricey, which is, in my opinion, not very worth spending your dollars on. You would rather have your full-time employee learn the platform and you can be up and running in no time, and that would have a much, much longer and larger ROI than getting an outside consultant to do your things. Another thing to note would be scalability, as I mentioned before, is on the low side. So try to maximize on that side of the platform, try to build it as minimal as possible so that you can scale on it without the model breaking all the time.