3 Ways Vena Makes Business Planning Better With Excel

Have you ever started working on an important financial model and thought, "I'm just gonna do this all in Excel."

If the answer is yes, you're definitely not alone--and that's because Excel is the universal language of business. Even after more than three decades on the market, Microsoft's iconic spreadsheet program remains the #1 choice for finance, operations and executive teams everywhere due to its flexibility, familiarity and superior ease of use.

But when you start using Excel to scale your key planning processes--such as budgeting, forecasting, reporting and ad hoc analysis--that's when things get a little more complicated. 

Excel is a powerful tool, but it's not designed to function like a comprehensive business planning application. Version control problems, data integrity issues and tedious manual aggregations will really slow you down if you're wrangling dozens of workbooks via email. As your business continues to grow, you're going to need a solution to help you plan efficiently, confidently and in collaboration with cross-functional teammates. You probably won't want to abandon everything you love about Excel though--and that's how Vena can help.

Vena is the only Complete Planning platform that marries enterprise-class functionality with the comfort and flexibility of Excel. Our Growth Engine technology features a native Excel interface, so you can use the tool you already know to do things you've only imagined. Instead of reverting back to spreadsheets outside of an existing planning tool--which according to BPM Partners is something 82% of finance teams do today--Vena gives you the best of both worlds. 

Curious to know how it works? Here are three ways Vena makes business planning better with Excel:

Mapping Your Excel Workbooks To a Centralized Cloud Database

There are times during a planning cycle when business requirements change, forcing you to adjust your numbers on the fly and work with new assumptions. Let's say, for example, that you're in the middle of budget approval season and your company wins a big deal that wasn't expected for another year. Now you've got to increase operating costs to service this spike in demand--and update the squeaky-clean budget you'd just worked so hard to finalize.

In that situation, here's what you'd need to do if all your processes lived in Excel:

1. Open up your department budgets and manually key in the changes to specific operational line items (headcount budget, materials cost, etc.).
 
2. Copy and paste the new figures into your balance sheet and income statement, then update your cash flow statement accordingly (ouch!).
 
3. Ensure your budgeted numbers reflect the new updates by triple-checking your inputs and re-confirming your calculations.
 
4. Email the updated workbooks to stakeholders across the business and secure executive approval all over again.

This could take days or even weeks depending on the size of your business. And with multiple versions of the same workbook floating around, it's tough to make sure your teammates are working from the same set of numbers. By the time you've sorted it out, there might be even more budget updates on your plate--making it difficult to pivot quickly and keep your business on track for success.

Vena solves this problem by providing one central planning database that maintains data integrity between all your unique budget templates. Dynamic mappings back to Excel ensure that as soon as a cell is updated, those changes are applied automatically across your entire dataset. Now, instead of constantly wondering which version of your budget is accurate, stakeholders can rest easy knowing that Vena is their one source of truth.

Let's take another look at the same example from above. Here's what the process would look like with Vena:

1. You adjust the line item details in your department budgets in Excel.
 
2. Vena goes to work on the back end. Dynamic mappings ensure that your cash flow statement, balance sheet, income statement and corresponding budgets are updated and aggregated automatically based on your new inputs.
 
3. Stakeholders and administrators are notified of the changes instantly, then prompted to review and approve. Audit trail functionality allows them to see exactly who changed what, complete with additional comments regarding why the changes were made. 

By eliminating the need for tedious manual data inputs, Vena frees up time for you to look toward the future of your business. Think about this for a second: What could you achieve today if you had more time to focus on tomorrow?

Detailed Analysis Right in the Excel Interface

If you've ever looked at a revenue forecast and wondered why you landed on that number, you might've opened Salesforce, your ERP and an offline Excel model to better understand the details. This highlights another common issue with business planning in Excel alone--it's great for organizing financial information, but it's hard to provide the right context when you're drawing from multiple data sources.