Vena Solutions

Vena scored 9 out of 10 in Customer Satisfaction in the BARC Planning Survey 26, ranked #1 across all four peer groups. Across 804 respondents and 20 products evaluated, it is the highest score in the field.​
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When 95% of users are satisfied with platform performance and 100% report better quality planning results, it points to something more than adoption. Vena reduces decision latency and supports on-time ex*****on at scale. That is what finance leadership is measuring when they evaluate whether a platform investment was the right one.​ See Vena’s highlights in The BARC Planning Survey 26: Link in comments.

Heijmans had a clear goal. The Dutch construction and real estate firm wanted to move from basic accounting to true business control. The problem was that cost planning, S-curve forecasting and cost modeling all lived in disconnected spreadsheets, with cost center owners exporting SAP data by hand and developers building their own formulas.​
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Working with Finext, experts in the Vena ecosystem, Heijmans rebuilt those processes on a structured foundation while keeping the Excel interface their teams that felt natural to their teams. The shift was real. Organizational cost planning that once took a full day now takes about an hour, and their IT team got days of budgeting lead time back with structured workflows.​
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As Heijmans' Operational Analysis and Improvement Manager Kees Leenders put it, they wanted to stop wasting time collecting information and start controlling the business. Now the data writes back to SAP and feeds Power BI on its own.​
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Read the full story of how Heijmans built a future-ready finance function.​ Link in comments

Every FP&A function eventually hits a ceiling. Tomorrow, we look at how the best ones break through it.​

61% of respondents said their executives perceive the FP&A team as a “transactional/reporting function” or “reliable advisors on financials”, whereas 31% said their executives perceive FP&A as “strategic business partners.”That disconnect is exactly what Vena CFO Melissa Howatson and Benchmarkit Founder and CEO Ray Rike unpack in The FP&A Maturity Ceiling webinar happening live tomorrow. ​

Built on Vena's 2026 FP&A Impact Report, the session covers why FP&A is still fighting for strategic influence, why data quality decides whether AI delivers, and what leading teams do differently to move from insight to on-time action.
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📅 Tomorrow, June 25 | 10:00 AM ET / 4:00 PM BST ​

Register at the link below before it starts. Link in comments.

Two-thirds of finance professionals rate their team's influence on business decisions as high or very high. Only 9% say their executives view them as critical drivers of growth. ​
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That distance is the most revealing finding in our 2026 FP&A Impact Report, built on a survey of 431 finance professionals. Just 31% said leadership sees FP&A as strategic business partners. The rest are perceived as a reliable advisor, or transactional reporting function. ​
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The gap is not about effort or talent. It is structural. As long as the operating model keeps finance producing reports on what already happened, the perception will hold. Self-identified "Leading" teams look different: 62% have fully embedded FP&A partners across every function and spend their time turning insight into decisions rather than producing the numbers​
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Ask yourself: is your finance team seen as a strategic partner or a reporting factory? The full report maps the path forward. ​Link in comments.

Decision latency is the time between a signal surfacing, a decision, and ex*****on. In finance, that lag is rarely about how fast teams think. It's about data density and disparity, with insights scattered across sources, ad hoc analysis in multiple locations and handoffs that stand in the way of on-time ex*****on. ​
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At Excelerate, Vena SVP of Product Andrew Stanbridge walked through how the Vena and Acterys unified data layer shortens that lag. The idea is simple but structural: extend the planning surface so the can business work in Power BI and finance can work in Excel. Business inputs captured in Power BI feed into Vena automatically, so finance is analyzing live business reality rather than last week's export. ​
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When the data and the decision sit on the same foundation, the time to ex*****on shrinks. That's how teams can reduce decision latency. ​Watch the full session, link in the comments.

And that's a wrap on Gartner® Finance Symposium/Xpo™ in London.​
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It was a pleasure connecting with EMEA finance leaders around how finance, business and IT teams are orchestrating planning, decisioning and close inside the Microsoft ecosystem to eliminate decision latency.​
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Steve Lockwood and Benno Van Ingen's session, "Bridging the Gap: How Structured Data, AI and Excel Drive Finance ROI," was impactful and helped attendees learn how structured data, AI and Excel work together to deliver Orchestrated Planning at the enterprise level.​
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Thanks to everyone who stopped by to connect with the Vena team. See you next year!​
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Gartner and Finance Symposium/Xpo are a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

The pace of market change is outrunning FP&A teams' ability to translate data into decisions and actions fast enough to matter.

Without solving long-standing data and collaboration challenges, even the most ambitious finance teams will hit a ceiling, their full potential as strategic partners going unrealized.

That gap between the work FP&A does and the influence it holds is the focus of our upcoming webinar, The FP&A Maturity Ceiling. Drawing on Vena's 2026 FP&A Impact Report, which surveyed over 400 finance leaders, Vena CFO Melissa Howatson and Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit Ray Rike get into what is holding FP&A functions back and what the most mature ones do differently.​
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The session covers why FP&A is still fighting for strategic influence, why data quality issues threaten AI adoption even with C-suite mandates behind it, and how leading teams shift from producing data to orchestrating decisions across the business.​
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📅 Thursday, June 25 | 10:00 AM ET / 3:00 PM BST ​
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Register at the link in comments.