Catching formula errors in spreadsheets by cross-checking results through Vena Copilot
Achieving scale without adding headcount, with Vena Copilot acting as a virtual financial analyst
Saving time answering budget owner questions, allowing Finance Manager to focus on more strategic projects
The Challenge: Making Finance a Better Business Partner
In 2018, when Andrew McFarlane was first hired as Finance Manager for education technology company Kuali Inc., the business was already in the midst of implementing BudgetPak, an FP&A solution. Andrew knew whatever technology they implemented would play a crucial role in helping him fulfill his core tasks and becoming an effective strategic partner to the rest of the business. But he quickly realized the solution the team had chosen wasn’t up to the job.
“When I implemented it, it was not a great experience,” he recalls. “It was an attempt to get myself and others out of spreadsheets—and I quickly realized that was not the way to go.”
It was almost two years later that Andrew was able to implement Vena instead. Its Excel-native interface and integration with the Microsoft 365 suite appealed to him, and he knew it would keep up with Kuali’s budgeting, forecasting and planning needs. “I think numbers just work in spreadsheets,” Andrew says. “We looked at all of the other major competitors, and they were just not it.”
Andrew was also able to use Vena to build out Kuali’s reporting for investors, key stakeholders and the executive team. But even as he built out that knowledge base, he found key stakeholders and budget owners often had questions they needed answered—taking time away from other critical tasks.
That’s when Andrew found out about Vena Copilot.
Getting Answers to Anyone, at Anytime, With Vena Copilot
When Vena first released their Complete Planning AI assistant, Vena Copilot, Andrew immediately saw the potential it offered. Vena Copilot had the ability to answer the critical questions coming from stakeholders throughout the organization, strengthening Finance’s role as a partner to the rest of the business while freeing up his time for higher-level tasks.
What’s more, with Vena he knew he could trust that Kuali’s data would remain protected and couldn’t be accessed by the outside world in any way.
“As soon as I brought up the idea of joining the beta program for Vena Copilot internally at Kuali, the immediate response was ‘what does this look like from a security and privacy point of view?’,” says Andrew. “When I asked that question back [to Vena], I got all the reassurance that checked all the boxes that our data is not going to train any models. It is strictly within our sphere—all that Vena Copilot is going to do is pull data from your cube and read it back to you.”
As he’s gotten to know the new technology, Andrew has also realized how easy Vena Copilot is to use, especially as an existing Vena user. “Once it clicked for me, everything seemed to work seamlessly. It followed a lot of the same patterns and language I was used to inside of Vena with setting up templates,” he says.
Now when stakeholders go to Andrew asking, “How am I performing to budget?” or “How much budget do I have left?”, instead of opening multiple reports, he can turn to Copilot and get an answer in mere minutes.
He can also dig deeper into the data with follow-up prompts to find out why certain departments may be over budget. Previously, this type of granularity could take hours to produce, ultimately disrupting Andrew’s flow of work.
Andrew has plans to roll the tool out to the broader Kuali team soon, getting early adopters on board before he scales further. “I want more budget owners to feel empowered to get their own answers to the questions that they have,” he says. “And I want this to be a major tool to help them transition to being more hands on inside of Vena as a whole.”
“Since I’m the only finance person at Kuali and we’re still in startup mode, budgets are tight. We don’t have the additional capital to go out and hire an additional one to three people to build a robust finance team. I needed an option [to scale] and the fact that Vena had that was just perfect.”
Andrew McFarlane
Finance Manager, Kuali Inc.