Vena Solutions

Vena Solutions Vena connects people, existing systems and data to power finance-led business planning and real time reporting using the world’s leading spreadsheet platform.

Add up to more with Vena. Book a demo: https://bit.ly/fbk-demo Vena turns Excel into an enterprise-class business solution with a centralized database, workflow, detailed audit trail and more. With Vena, hundreds of leading global brands now get trusted numbers and insights – fast – without sacrificing their favorite spreadsheet software. Our customers use Vena for corporate performance management (CPM) applications including budgeting, financial close management and reporting, and automating other spreadsheet-driven processes beyond Finance. Vena is the fastest growing cloud CPM vendor, and the only one to embrace – not replace – Excel spreadsheets.

10/15/2026

You know the ask. A leader wants one view of performance across every business, and wants it before the meeting.

It sounds simple until you open the files. Different ERPs, different charts of accounts, different report layouts, some arriving as PDFs and printed packages. Every number is right but none of them line up.

That was daily life at Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, where franchises, real estate, agriculture and media sit under one roof, each with its own way of reporting. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment Vice President of Financial Data and Analytics Steve Thomas named the biggest risk plainly, they had no clear, real-time view of everything they run.

Now one consistent template in Vena maps into each business unit’s data model and delivers the same output every period. One report can cover three companies at once. According to Steve, users have gone from hours to minutes pulling reports.

The speed is nice. The bigger shift is that his team now feels more like a cohesive unit, all chasing the same goal. That is how you turn insight into on-time ex*****on. Same Excel experience Finance already knows but a very different afternoon.

When did your business units last feel like one team? Read the full story at the link in comments

What stops an AI pilot from scaling in finance? Usually it is not speed.A pilot runs on a clean dataset in a controlled ...
10/15/2026

What stops an AI pilot from scaling in finance? Usually it is not speed.

A pilot runs on a clean dataset in a controlled setting. Scaling means real numbers, several systems and people who have to stand behind what they report. That is where trust gets tested, and where the common blockers show up: hallucinated outputs, fragmented data and no clear audit trail.

Making the organization faster takes AI that sits inside governed workflows, where output traces back to trusted data and a person makes the final call. That is the path to on-time ex*****on.

Join Corporate Finance Hub Founder Bojan Radojicic and Vena Solutions Consultant Mitch McCabe October 27th as they cover what is breaking AI trust in finance today and the framework CFOs are using to move from pilots to governed, auditable action.

October 27
11:00 AM–12:00 PM ET

Register: Link in comments

10/14/2026

How much of month-end is spent checking everything just to find the few things still need a closer look?

That’s where AI can start to change the day-to-day. It can take on more of the routine checks, giving people in Finance more time to focus on the exceptions, the analysis and the decisions that need context and judgment.

In the latest Ask an Expert, Vena CFO Melissa Howatson and Vena Director of Partner Development Jon Steele talk about what that shift can mean for human agency and the role Finance plays in moving the business forward.

Where do your best executive conversations happen? In our experience, they happen over dinner with peers, on a boat at s...
10/09/2026

Where do your best executive conversations happen?

In our experience, they happen over dinner with peers, on a boat at sunset, among leaders who carry the same weight of decisions you do.

That's the idea behind The Executive Experience, our invite-only gathering for finance, data and technology leaders happening at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on October 28-29. Attendance is limited and highly selective by design, so every conversation includes voices from finance, technology and business leadership.

Over two days you'll join peer roundtables across finance, technology and business leadership where the conversation will get into where AI is creating value, how planning maturity is changing, what stronger data ownership looks like and where leaders are choosing to invest next.

You'll hear from The Wolff Company CFO Whitney Goodwin, Brookfield Residential CIO Brandon Sharp, Vena CFO Melissa Howatson, Citrin Cooperman Partner Chris McCarthy, along with other experts at the table. You’ll have the space to compare approaches, challenge assumptions and hear how peers are thinking about the tradeoffs and decisions that matter most, so you leave with a clearer view of what deserves attention in 2027.

📍 The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel
📅 October 28–29

Request an invitation: Link in comments

10/09/2026

If your FP&A function is already at the Integrated stage, you’ve solved a lot of the hard stuff. Plans are connected, assumptions are shared and people have a much clearer view of what is happening across the business.

The frustration is that when something changes and suddenly you’re back in meetings, email threads and manual follow-ups trying to work out who needs to make the call and what happens next.

That's the sign it's time to move from Integrated to Orchestrated.

It comes down to a few practical questions:
What signals should trigger action?
Who owns the decision and what workflow makes sure the next step happens?

When those pieces are clear, FP&A is producing better insight and helping the business move from insight into on-time ex*****on with much less friction.

Listen to Vena CFO Melissa Howatson walks through what that shift looks like and why it is often the hardest stage of FP&A maturity.

Explore the full FP&A Maturity Model and take the self-assessment: Link in comments

More than eight in ten finance professionals are already using at least one AI tool directly inside Excel, whether that ...
10/07/2026

More than eight in ten finance professionals are already using at least one AI tool directly inside Excel, whether that is Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or all three, according to our latest research.

And They're using it to amplify work that already lives in Excel: summarizing financial information, visualizing data, building models and working through scenarios.

AI in Excel is the natural path for teams looking to supercharge their processes. Finance doesn't need to move the data from one place to another or rebuild the workflow elsewhere to start getting more out of AI in the . It can sit closer to the models, assumptions and analysis people are already working with.

See how finance professionals are using AI inside Excel today and what it means for the broader finance tech stack: Link in comments

Introducing the new Vena Analytics Agent in open beta, expanding on our AI foundation. Built directly on the live Vena ...
10/06/2026

Introducing the new Vena Analytics Agent in open beta, expanding on our AI foundation.

Built directly on the live Vena financial model, the Analytics Agent can work through multi-step questions around variances, trends, comparisons, rankings and financial performance while building cumulative context from the business knowledge, preferences and instructions teams choose to share.

And because trust matters as much as speed, its analysis is designed to be inspectable and refinable. Teams can see how an answer was reached, identify missing context or uncertainty, correct assumptions and rerun the analysis before putting it to work. Finance doesn’t need AI that just gives answers. It needs AI that understands the business and shows its work.

We’re also expanding Vena MCP, making it easier to bring governed Vena financial and operational data into supported enterprise AI tools and workflows across the business.

Across both capabilities, the principle is simple: AI reasoning can be probabilistic. Financial calculations shouldn’t be. Vena brings them together—putting powerful AI on top of the governed, deterministic financial foundation teams already trust.

Learn more in the comments

Jason Windows was spending too much time maintaining its planning system when the business needed Finance focused on wha...
10/06/2026

Jason Windows was spending too much time maintaining its planning system when the business needed Finance focused on what was changing.

In a complex manufacturing environment, shifts in supply chains, demand and operating costs can quickly change the assumptions behind a forecast. Jason Windows needed a planning process that was easier to manage and flexible enough to work through different outcomes as those assumptions moved.

With Vena, budgeting, forecasting and scenario modeling stayed in the familiar Excel environment, with governance, control and automation supporting the process behind it. During periods of uncertainty, that gave the team more room to test scenarios and adjust plans with confidence.

That is the context behind Jason Windows CFO Graham Walters’ point about flexibility.

Read the full Jason Windows story: Link in comments

10/05/2026

What does an orchestrated close look like for finance, business and IT teams?

Delbridge Solutions Co-founder & COO Harjot Ghai explains that an orchestrated close connects data, people and AI in one governed solution with the controls to ensure accuracy. Governed data is how teams can turn AI insights into business outcomes.

When close, forecasting and budgeting run through one governed environment instead of two disconnected applications, teams spend less time reconciling and more time deciding. Actuals reach the forecast faster, and decisions get made on today's numbers, not last month's.

Reducing decision latency between the close and this month's ex*****on is what orchestrated planning, decisioning and close is built for.

What would faster access to close data change about your forecasting cycle?

AI made your finance team faster. So why isn't the business moving any quicker?That's the disconnect most finance, opera...
10/01/2026

AI made your finance team faster. So why isn't the business moving any quicker?

That's the disconnect most finance, operations and IT teams are living in right now. Forecasts get built faster, models get sharper, but decisions still sit in the same queue of meetings, emails and "let me check one more thing."

Roughly seven in ten business leaders say slow decisions and delayed ex*****on cost their organization up to 5% of annual revenue, according to consulting firm West Monroe.

The gap is decision latency, which is the distance between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Our new maturity model maps four stages finance functions move through to close that gap: Fragmented, Structured, Integrated and Orchestrated. Each one describes a different relationship between people, data and AI, ending in a state where all three move together and on-time ex*****on becomes the default, not the exception.

Swipe through the stages, then tell us: where does your FP&A function sit today?

The full report is linked in the comments👇

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