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  • 1.  Long-Term Strategy Model

    Founding Member
    Posted 02-14-2022 17:42
    Does any have any experience of building a long-term planning model in Vena?

    We are attempting to move our 10 year financial model into Vena.  I think that is the easy part.

    The second piece is the strategic piece and how to incorporate potential business changes (i.e. acquisition/divestiture/capital investment/etc) into that model and then be able to see the impacts of those decisions on the overall business.

    I've done this in Excel, but we are trying to do this in Vena where you can "Add/Remove" Modules (i.e. projects) as we cycle through different scenarios.

    Any thoughts or suggestions?

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    Jeff Kaminsky
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  • 2.  RE: Long-Term Strategy Model

    Founding Member
    Posted 03-04-2022 08:41
    Have you used 'Scenarios' in Vena?  May mean creating several scenarios with different variations of decisions/projects but that is probably the best way to use Vena.

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    David Cornfield
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  • 3.  RE: Long-Term Strategy Model

    Founding Member
    Posted 03-08-2022 10:55

    Hi Jeff. We just tried this for the first time last year as we started creating templates to handle our 5-10 year time multi-year planning. What we've found since is that we need to spend more time thinking through what level of detail we need for certain audiences. For many of our grants or operational budgets, we plan at a very detailed level, but it's very tedious to tag those lines in an easy way to roll-up to higher level strategic categories. We've tried a couple of times to create a methodology that does that, i.e. this type of expense/code goes 100% to Strategic Category A while another type goes to Category B or a certain percent goes to Category A and B. This method works fairly well for us and while it's not perfectly accurate, it does give us a "directionally accurate" view of how our multi-year planning maps to our strategic goals.

    We haven't yet incorporated many scenarios like you or David describe, but it is something that we're trying to explore this year - essentially creating a what-if scenario where we ask various leaders "if you had $#### more, what would you invest that money in?" The hope is that we're then able to get a better idea what we should focus our fundraising and investing efforts on. We'd also like to build a few high level driver models as well, which for us would be something like "If we build a new ward at a health clinic, what will the capital and operating costs look like for the next 5-10 years, and how will this improve the care we're able to provide patients?" Marrying the financial to our programmatic/strategic goals will be an important part of our decision making process.



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    Brendan Eger
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  • 4.  RE: Long-Term Strategy Model

    Founding Member
    Posted 03-29-2022 17:31
    Hi @Jeff Kaminsky. Curious about any progress you've made on this since your initial post and if you've got any lessons to share? After re-reading your question again, I wonder if you might consider using Line Item Details to handle the "Add/Remove Modules"​​. I can sort of picture a template where you can map out various scenarios as rows and then use Line Item Details to play with various drivers in that scenario.

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    Brendan Eger
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