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  • 1.  What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Venanite
    Posted 11-15-2022 11:07
    Naturally, I hear a lot about the more common use cases for Vena around different parts of the business; FP&A, Accounting, HR, Sales, and many more.

    I'm always curious to hear about the out of the box use cases that people find a use for through Vena.

    What's the niche process or excel frankenstein brain child that you're running through Vena that you're willing to share?


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    Jarran Francis
    Sr. Manager, Customer Success
    Vena Solutions
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  • 2.  RE: What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Venanite
    Posted 11-16-2022 10:23
    Since our finance team are in Vena, I think we might be the poster child for Frankenstein usage. Some key examples:
    • Annual Compensation Review Process (integrates well with the Workforce Planning build)
    • Forecasting Accounts Payables and Accounts Receivable by invoice
    • Bonus calculation and notification
    • Commission calculation and notification (not too Frankenstein anymore since we now have a package for this!)
    For us, it's important to be comfortable with things not working out. We are all about creativity and the "better, better, never best" mentality. It's resulted in some really cool experiments!

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    Olivia MacDonald
    Manager, Financial Systems and Operations
    PwC
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  • 3.  RE: What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Venanite
    Posted 12-02-2022 17:22

    Can't contribute to any very unique ways we use Vena on the Partner Sales team - but I will say that receiving our commission statements through the platform as salespeople is actually a great experience! Once you follow the instructions one time, no need to refer back to them again in the future. Very easy & intuitive way to get detailed insight on how my commission number is compiled  :)

    I know our VP & others on the team use the platform to budget, plan, and make headcount planning decisions.

    We appreciate you, Vena Finance Team!!!​



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    Kash Palkowski
    Vena Solutions
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  • 4.  RE: What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Posted 11-17-2022 13:05
    Love this thread of brainstorming and sharing of ideas on unique ways of using Vena! Would love to hear from our amazing customers to see if they have anything to share, or if you'll be following along this thread to get inspiration from the community for your organization 🤩
    @Brendan Eger @Tasha Orange @Clement Marlin @Josh Weinberg @Rebecca Swank ​​​​​​

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    Irene Tang
    Community Marketing Manager
    Vena Solutions
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  • 5.  RE: What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Posted 11-17-2022 16:34
    Excited to hear how other companies are utilizing Vena in some unique ways!

    Similar to what Olivia mentioned we have built out a few different reports integrated with the workforce planning module specifically related to payroll accruals, bonus calculations and compensation incentives. We've also built out some extensive reports specifically related to reporting we have to submit to the NFL. Very nuanced, but it's been incredibly helpful to have it all in one place and to provide efficiency and additional check figures along the way.

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    Rebecca Swank
    Senior Accountant
    Kansas City Chiefs
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  • 6.  RE: What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Founding Member
    Posted 12-05-2022 16:26

    Sorry for the delayed response.

    At PIH, we started out by using Vena to plan our Operating and Workforce budgets, but a few months after our initial implementation we built a Compensation template that aligned with our performance review process. Supervisors were able to make recommendations for their staff and then the HR and Finance team had one final review before we then pushed those updated salaries into our Workforce template. We've also dabbled in Capital Planning and Procurement Planning templates. The latter was helpful as we asked our procurement and clinical teams across 5 countries to forecast the quantity of specific items needed to deliver our patient care, and then the data rolled up into some budget categories for our Finance team to review and incorporate into our Operating budget template. We've talked about building more driver templates so that teams can plan in their own way while ultimately getting the Finance team the budget data they need - i.e. if we add a new ward in a hospital this coming year, how many more patients might we see? how many clinicians will we need to server those patients? how many operations/admin staff will we need to support? how will our inventory and procurement plans be affected? etc. etc.

    Beyond that, I built a proof of concept for a patient registration template (i.e. a new patient arrives at one of our health facilities and we need to collect some basic information from them) for our team in Haiti, but we didn't end up using it as there was another mobile health system a different team was simultaneously developing for wider use so strategically it made more sense to wait and align with that. Although we didn't adopt this template, it was an interesting exercise to think through how Vena could be used for different types of data collection, beyond the Finance world and I think we'll consider it again depending on what is needed.



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    Brendan Eger
    Assoc. Dir. of Information Systems and Analytics
    Partners In Health
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  • 7.  RE: What are the unusual ways you use Vena?

    Founding Member
    Posted 12-14-2022 10:20
    We are in the heavy equipment rental business and have daily reporting requirements of value of equipment vs. equipment on rent.

    We manually load the data in daily and report (it's great because we have historical also) without the MASSIVE excel spreadsheets we once had.

    Now, to get it automated - that's the next goal!

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    Tracy Cook
    Business Intelligence Manager
    Acme Lift
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