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  • 1.  Elevating Financial Literacy in Your Organization 📖

    Posted 04-01-2022 10:52

    In celebration of Financial Literacy Month and to kick off the first day of April, we invite you to share how you elevate or enhance the financial literacy of key stakeholders in your organization? 🤔


    Perhaps you could share the learnings of when you implemented Vena in your organization, or how you taught team leads on the importance of the budgeting process and how to set up their budgets. Whatever it is, we'd love to hear the learnings, tips and best practices you've gained.


    And to make this extra exciting, a few lucky members could be featured and credited in one of Vena's upcoming blog posts! With a readership of over 18,000 per month, position yourself as a thought leader among your peers. 👀


    Looking forward to hearing from everyone! And good luck! 🌱



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    Irene Tang
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  • 2.  RE: Elevating Financial Literacy in Your Organization 📖

    Venanite
    Posted 04-04-2022 09:14
    Hi Irene,

    Some ways the finance team adds financial literacy to the organization are as follows:

     1. As part of the on-boarding process, a representative from the financial reporting team and FP&A team will meet with all the new hires and discuss the budgeting process at Vena (how we leverage our own software in budgeting) and the difference between a bottom's up vs. a top down budget. The financial reporting team will discuss how we leverage the ETL connection between our ERP system and Vena to perform month end analysis and prepare investor reporting. We also discuss how we use Vena on the team to perform other tasks such as cash flow forecasting, headcount planning, commissions calculations, covenant calculations etc. This provides all Vennanites some insight into the financial processes at the Company.

    2. On a monthly basis, we prepare analysis of financial results and those results are consolidated into an executive leadership presentation. The presentation is presented to executive leaders to provide insight into key financial and non financial KPIs to aid in business decision making. As part of the monthly process, results are also presented to department heads so they have insight into how their group is tracking against the Plan.

    3.  We provide the validated underlying data to the operations team which helps generate a Power BI dashboard that visualizes key KPI results. The data is provided directly within the Vena Platform. The dashboard is available after month end via our Intranet to employees.

    4. The finance team maintains a "finance dictionary" with key terms and definitions on how metrics are calculated. This dictionary is available for all to view on the company intranet.

    Looking forward to see what other companies are doing :)

    Mariam

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    Mariam Azhar
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  • 3.  RE: Elevating Financial Literacy in Your Organization 📖

    Founding Member
    Posted 04-26-2022 17:31

    At PIH, we have each department run a monthly orientation session for new hires to join as they're able (if you miss it this month, no problem because you can join next month). I haven't been to the Finance session in a bit, but the focus was very high level to help new hires understand how the organization is funded (unrestricted vs restricted), key systems to access reports/submit expenses/get help, and a brief introduction into a widely available organizational financial report to see key updates on revenue, expenses, and budgets across our highest categories (country programs, fundraising, administration, etc.). Finance leadership also provides an organizational wide update during all staff meetings at least 2 times a year (usually after key milestones like our fiscal year close or end of year fundraising campaigns).

    Beyond that, our FP&A team provides direct support to budget managers to help them navigate and understand the detail of our Vena templates and Power BI reports, as well as show them how to access our knowledge base which has step by step instructions with screenshots for various templates and reports.

    I think we'd like to improve financial literacy more broadly, but the challenge has been finding the right balance of information for certain audiences as well as having the capacity within the team to do more outreach and education.



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    Brendan Eger
    Assoc. Dir. of Information Systems and Analytics
    Partners In Health
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