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As Director of FP&A for a 30-employee start-up, Sal Amato oversees more than FP&A. He also leads IT and accounting, for which he manages two external consulting firms.
“Being only the second finance hire,” Sal said, “you have to wear many different hats. And at times, it can become very challenging and overwhelming. That's why when we invest in a tool, I need it to work correctly—I don’t have time to second guess if it will work.”
When he joined Excision BioTherapeutics, the CRISPR-based, clinical-stage biotechnology firm had no formal budgeting cycle. There was a lot of second guessing with misplaced data, overridden data, version control discrepancies, unlocked models and miscoded value inputs.
These data uncertainties triggered additional time spent on manual verification. It resulted in an additional three to four weeks every budget cycle on data aggregation leading to—upon completion—information that would still be uselessly outdated.
After Excision BioTherapeutics’ first formal budgeting cycle, they hit their breaking point.
Sal was a Vena user in his last role. As a Senior Financial Analyst at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, he had leveraged Vena to find cost efficiencies for the nonprofit. After informing his CFO at Excision BioTherapeutics about its value, they selected Vena for the flexibility, Excel native interface and template drill-down functionalities.
“Other solutions I looked at tried to pigeonhole us in how to budget. Vena gave me the tools to budget in the way that was best for our organization.”
The implementation took about six weeks. (Sal noted it would’ve been four had he not caught COVID during the process.)
Now with Vena’s automated data aggregation, workflow notifications and secure templates, Excision BioTherapeutics has real-time numbers and faster reports. They complete monthly data aggregation within one week of month’s end, leading to what Sal called, “more actionable information.” This also accelerated his variance analysis for board reporting, which now takes only four hours instead of 10.
It has saved Sal not only time from the FP&A function, but also saved Excision BioTherapeutics from avoidable costs.
“If we didn't have Vena, I would probably have to bring on another FTE to help with the FP&A function. With Vena, we are able to save money on headcount and invest in the solution that drives more value to the company. Vena has helped keep our overall cost down … Given that we're a very small team, we need to find efficiencies whenever we can with the software and solutions that we're using.”
Vena’s template drill-down functionalities allow Sal to track and source every value input. He investigates expense transactions to further reduce costs."
“That is such a powerful feature for end users. In finance, we take it for granted because if I see a thousand dollars in travel for a department, I can hone into that very quickly, but our stakeholders don't know what that is,” Sal said. “And if you have a large team, you don't know where the spend is. But Vena really allows users to see and understand where the spend is and not just see a number on a page.
“Being a start-up, our cash burn is very important. With Vena, we get better sight lines into how we're spending our funds every month. And it helps to align us better to our goals.”
Now, with greater granularity in budgeting, Sal has secured buy-in from budget owners. More than one-third of Excision BioTherapeutics uses Vena, where a few times weekly, department managers view reports and perform their own budgeting and forecasting.
This has shifted Excision BioTherapeutics from top-down budgeting to bottom-up budgeting—which had been Sal’s goal upon joining the firm. After they implemented Vena in summer 2021, they performed their first reforecast.
“We're going to implement that as a more standard practice,” he said. “Eventually getting to the point where we reforecast monthly … We’re capturing the scenario planning within our reforecast because we are reforecasting frequently.”
As their Senior Director of Finance (he was promoted in early 2022), Sal wants to build new models for cash flow planning. He plans to use Vena to transition Excision BioTherapeutics further away from approval-based accounting and move toward FP&A cash flow mastery.
“Improving our cash flow projections will be critical. Right now, we're capturing our cash flow planning offline,” he said. “As we grow, we will need to understand how our cash flow rolls into our P&Ls and differentiate between cash and accrual accounting … Our board is always interested in our cash position and so are our investors. Having a strong tool in place where we can capture our goals as an organization with our work streams and correlate that to our spend is very important to our Board.”
A year and a half into implementing Vena, Sal has given Excision BioTherapeutics more meaningful data for analysis, more cash savings for organizational goal alignment—and more ease of mind for their 30 employees working to cure viral infectious diseases and improve the lives of chronically ill patients.
“I don’t have to go back and double-check that data is correct, which frees my time to work on other projects,” Sal said. “I also oversee IT and accounting. I can’t waste time making sure that our FP&A solution is working correctly. When something goes wrong, people know it … I value the subtleness that everything is running smoothly. Vena enables me to create a smooth and efficient environment where everything appears to be running flawlessly at all times.”
The wearer-of-many-hats went on to say, “Despite the numerous challenges that need to be addressed, the knowledge that our finances are well organized provides a sense of reassurance to everyone involved.”