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  • 1.  How do you incentivize people on your team to submit information on Vena in a timely manner?

    Venanite
    Posted 07-20-2022 10:54
    Hi Everyone,

    During a recent conversation with one of my customers, an interesting topic came up. They use Vena for month-end processes and he was curious on how other Vena Admins incentivize members of their team to submit information on Vena in a timely manner for their own processes.

    Any thoughts?

    Thanks!

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    Thiago Azevedo
    Enterprise Customer Success Manager
    Vena Solutions
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  • 2.  RE: How do you incentivize people on your team to submit information on Vena in a timely manner?

    Posted 07-21-2022 09:29
    Hi Thiago,

    This is a great topic, I'm glad you posted about it. We are just finishing up implementation and I created a month end process in Vena for our finance team (small team of 7 people). We are still testing out the month end process and would love to hear how others set up/use the month end process. I set up a workflow for each persons month end tasks and some tasks are built so that another person can't start their task until a prior task is finished. For example, we were trying to eliminate the need of wondering when all invoices had been entered for the month so that depreciation could be calculated without missing any expenses. So if our AP person "submits" that they have entered all invoices then the task for depreciation populates for the person responsible.

    Can you give more detail as to what you mean by submitting information? What times of information do you mean? Or an example? Our incentive to get the team to use Vena is that our Controller has complete transparency of where we are in the month end process. We are working to decrease the time it takes us to close a month from 8-10 days to 6-8 days (or less). This way we can distribute reports to other executives much quicker. I will admit I haven't stopped using my old excel spreadsheet for month end (my checklist), but I'm getting closer.

    I'm working on transitioning any spreadsheets I used for my month end calculations to Vena templates to automate everything there and include the template in the task. Making it more of a one-stop shop. But it just takes time to transition and map everything out. I did learn that I needed to make some of my spreadsheets that I use in Account Reconciliation a Global File instead of a process file so that I can access the template in both processes. In some of my month end tasks I complete the Account Reconciliation for that account. If anyone knows of a better/different way of being able to access a file in Vena for multiple processes please let me know. I'm still so new.

    Would love to hear how everyone else does their month end process?

    Thanks,
    Carrie

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    Carrie Billings
    Assistant Controller
    Indiana Tech
    ccbillings@indianatech.edu
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  • 3.  RE: How do you incentivize people on your team to submit information on Vena in a timely manner?

    Founding Member
    Posted 07-22-2022 12:28
    Hi Thiago,

    Coworker signoff is one of the hardest things to get, especially if there is no upper management support.

    Like Carrie, I built out workflows with dependencies to help the process and nobody would use them.  I was so frustrated I deleted out the entire workflow out of the system.  Now that those folks who wouldn't buy in to these processes are no longer employed here (here's a surprise - they weren't compliant in other area's also) I will build them out so we aren't just relying on multiple shared excel spreadsheets.

    I don't believe in incentivizing team members to do the right thing and use the proper tools given to them.

    Now I just need to find the time to rebuild everything because the new team I have are amazing and they understand why we need the change! Information and communication is POWERFUL.

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    Tracy Cook
    Business Intelligence Manager
    Acme Lift
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