Data is an important asset for businesses, but if you're not making the most of it, how is it powering your plan to grow?
Data is the central element that connects people, processes and technology. As your business scales, so will your data. That's why putting it to work is critical for helping you drive more informed decisions, unlocking potential business opportunities, building resilience and fostering growth within every level of your organization.
Taking full advantage of your data means being empowered to get the most value from it and this is where Vena's Extended Planning solutions can help supercharge your data's potential.
Powered by our Growth Engine technology, Vena's Extended Planning solutions let you dive deeper into your data--both financial and non-financial--see your insights in real time and plan with intention across your business. From workforce, capital expense and detailed revenue planning to cash flow, operational planning and business-wide reporting and analysis, you'll be able to communicate your numbers in a language all your teams will understand.
What is Vena's Extended Planning?
Vena's
Finance-Led Planning solutions
let you automate tedious finance tasks and integrate data into a centralized secure location so your team can spend more time on what matters most for your business, diving deep into the data and uncovering valuable business insights instead of digging through multiple systems. Extended Planning takes you one step further, where you can include critical operational data and communicate it clearly and effectively across your organization to drive adoption and influence quick and informed business decisions.
Extended Planning is the bigger picture part of your planning process and entails looking at the micro details of your data to inform your plans to grow. It's a deep dive into your operational data to glean insights specific to what is working and what's not and to constantly chart a course forward.
As an ongoing process, Extended Planning turns your business into a strategic, data-driven enterprise with five main goals:
1. Build full business alignment
2. Provide finance with organization-wide visibility
3. Set up your business for change
4. Fuel growth opportunities
5. Build cross-departmental collaboration
Benefits of Extended Planning
Vena's Extended Planning enables your team to measure operational performance and KPIs using
ad hoc reporting
and to use real-time data as a compass to put your plans into action. With
rolling forecasts,
agile cash flow management
, pre-configured templates and flexible
scenario modeling
capabilities, you'll be able to adjust your assumptions, mitigate risks, account for change, pivot when necessary and always know where your business stands no matter what happens.
In this blog post, we'll break down the seven main use cases for Vena's Extended Planning solutions and show you how you can communicate your numbers clearly across your organization, increase adoption and keep your business growing.
Keep reading to discover how Vena can help you streamline:
Cash Flow Planning
Cash flow is the lifeline of your business so how can you keep it flowing and not leave cash management to chance? Vena's Extended Planning helps cash planning and management become a strategic function of your organization, enabling you to easily navigate fluctuating cash flow cycles. With Vena's cash flow planning capabilities, you can create driver-based models that you can run monthly, weekly or daily and adjust your assumptions and cash flow plans at a moment's notice. If you already work with models you know and like, that's not an issue. You can use your existing Excel models and financial statements to configure a direct or indirect cash flow statement. Vena even allows you to create scenario models for any situation, so you always know where your business stands, no matter what happens. When it comes to cash flow planning, Vena enables you to be as detailed as you need to be so you can flourish even when economic conditions change, find hidden cash in your business and get the most from your working capital.
Workforce Planning
Meeting your current and future business goals means having the right workforce in place now and as your company grows to fill any organizational skill gaps along the way. Building a workforce that is equipped to address the ongoing needs of your business requires effective workforce planning. That's why you want to make sure you're diving into the details of workforce planning with Vena.
Vena gives you the ability to plan and report at the individual personnel level, from taxes to salaries to fringe benefits. With Vena's workforce dashboard, you can report, analyze and communicate on payroll plan. You'll get a clearer picture of one of your business's biggest expenditures and can then integrate that detailed workforce plan into your overall finance budget. With this level of detail, you can rest assured that your business and workforce will be ready for anything.
Capital Expense Planning
While most businesses are focussed on current operational expenses, capital expenses are equally important as you plan to grow your business. But capital expenditures can get out of control quite easily and end up costing your company a lot of money if not planned and handled properly. This is why your operational and capital expense planning should work in tandem. And with Vena's Extended Planning, they can.
Capital expense planning with Vena means accelerating your capital expenditure and operating expense planning with built-in templates for faster time to value. You can integrate detailed capex plans into your operations and budget plans for both future and existing projects and asset acquisitions. Input and manage individual assets by properties, such as book value, useful life, residual amounts and more. Create accurate forecasts with driver-based calculations for common operating expenses. And with integration to your source systems, you'll always be working with the latest, most accurate details.
You'll never go back to operating without this level of detail and for good reason. The substantial costs and long-term effects of capital expenditures are critical to an organization's future success.
Detailed Revenue Planning
Aligning your organizational data to your objectives is simple when you can have all of your numbers in a single source of truth. That's what Vena's detailed revenue planning helps you do as you improve your business alignment and gain greater visibility from a central database. Vena lets you create and manage detailed revenue plans based on key operational metrics--with adjust and pivot capabilities at your fingertips--so you can update them easily as conditions change.
Since Vena's revenue planning capabilities automatically aggregate data, this means you can continuously and accurately forecast your product and/or services revenue to stay ahead of sales results and the bottom line. You'll also be able to easily alter key revenue metrics to improve predictability of revenue forecasts as well as alignment between revenue-driven departments.
See how Vena powered profitability analysis for Vanguard University.
Operational Planning
When you can manage any type of plan from a single platform with Vena's Extended Planning capabilities, project, inventory, demand and marketing planning become a breeze.
Project planning in Vena lets you create, plan and report on detailed project plans so you can tie everything back to the bottom line. Vena's demand planning capabilities help you match capacity against forecasts, monitor inventory flow and model revenue against your key drivers. You can even plan your Marketing with Vena and get detailed plan reports based on ROI and integrations with external CRMs.
What-If Analysis
Making decisions based on insight, not instinct, means testing your assumptions across the business. Vena's Extended Planning helps you simplify and manage any type of plan--workforce, capital expense, revenue, sales, operational and even marketing--from a secure, single source of truth. Leveraging the Vena Growth Engine's central database, source system integrations and unlimited modeling capabilities, extended planning in Vena enables you to Collaborate across your organization and get alignment with what-if analysis for any department or type of plan.
What-if scenarios help give your business a heads up, to carry out countless scenarios against changing variables, ultimately preparing your company for any situation adequately.
Business-Wide Reporting and Analysis
Looking to provide updates to investors, board members and external stakeholders? Bring them all to the table with Vena. You can simplify complex financial and non-financial data with Vena's intuitive dashboards and analytics. Answer specific questions with a simple click or swipe in the dashboard's drill down function and move ahead with agility as internal and external key players are aligned with your company's latest performance and insights.
Turn Your Data Into a Direction
If the answers to your business questions are hidden in your data, easily bring them to the surface with Vena's Extended Planning. By turning your data into a direction and understanding your business--past, present and future--you and your teams can constantly challenge your business plans, stay ahead of change and move forward with a shared vision.
