Vena and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Time was, when obtaining a comprehensive overview and analysis of your company’s financial and operational performance meant endless hours of manual data transfers between systems and tedious checking of the output figures to ensure that spreadsheet-driven errors had hopefully been eliminated from your carefully prepared company reports and analyses.

All that has changed now, and FP&A teams can expect to have full visibility into their company performance in ways that until a few years ago were extremely difficult and time-consuming to achieve.

Leading the way in this paradigm shift are Vena Solutions, with their AI-powered complete planning platform, specifically designed to extend the capabilities of Excel spreadsheets for FP&A. In this article, we take a look at what Vena is and why it is fast becoming the platform of choice for Financial Planning, Analysis, and Reporting. 

What Exactly is Vena?

Vena Solutions software is a complete FP&A platform which provides a fully integrated business Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, & Reporting system using infused Agentic AI to streamline finance workflows and help finance teams to really focus on key business drivers. It automates reports, analyses, and insights and makes real-time FP&A expertise available to anyone in your organisation via the aforementioned AI agents.

Because Vena is built on Microsoft Excel, it is familiar and intuitive for everyone to use and it is also easy to integrate with virtually all of your existing company data platforms. If you already maintain an Excel-based budgeting and forecasting system, it can be easily re-created within Vena so that you can transform it into a fully AI-infused centralised and automated system which saves costly monthly spreadsheet maintenance and error checking routines, while delivering improved productivity, flexibility, and all with the security of a centralised database.

Vena's approach to delivering financial modelling recognises that every department in your company already uses Excel as their go-to financial and operational data analysis tool. Historically, this has meant that it can be a huge undertaking for a company to transform its business planning from a spreadsheet to a secure application-based system, but with Vena's intuitive drag-and-drop interface your transformation will be fast and secure and will deliver collaborative, Agentic AI in fully managed database system.

What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ?

Most people will be aware of Microsoft’s well-known ERP platform, which is specifically designed for small to mid-size businesses who are typically in a dynamic stage of business growth. 

More specifically, Business Central is used to unify all the various point-solutions in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite and is therefore capable of delivering advanced company-wide insights into, and management of, all core business processes including finance, sales, services, supply chain, operations, projects and CRM. 

For growing businesses, this provides a powerful capability to seamlessly integrate all Microsoft-based tools and third-party apps and to benefit from built-in scalability to future-proof your core business processes.

Vena + Dynamics 365 Business Central Integration

Vena Solutions was built from the ground-up on Microsoft technology. This was a strategic decision taken by Vena from the earliest days of development. 

Vena recognised that competitor products in their business space all advocated throwing-out Excel as a means of Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Reporting. This assertion was based on what appeared to be sound reasoning - that spreadsheets are personal productivity tools and as such are very prone to user-introduced errors, which are amplified when the same spreadsheet is shared and used by others. It then becomes very difficult and costly to manage and collate many spreadsheets into one application. 

However, Vena’s approach was to embrace Excel and enhance it, because users were not adopting the competition’s solutions as intended. As it turned out, the steep learning curve required to master alternative applications was too often seen as a barrier to adoption and in most cases, users either exported data back to Excel for analysis or simply reverted to their original Excel-based systems.

Because Vena software is built on Microsoft technology, Vena Solutions quickly became the market-leading FP&A platform built for the Microsoft ecosystem, as users are able to seamlessly plug into any existing Microsoft environment to drive smarter, faster and more accurate financial processes. 

What This Integration Means

Before Vena, if a company wanted to implement an enterprise-wide Corporate Performance Management system, it was a huge task. As well as the issues previously mentioned regarding training users on any new system and ensuring user-adoption, there was a huge cost involved in actually creating these systems in the first place. 

It was not unusual for teams of consultants to have to build dedicated Data Warehouses and associated Data Marts in order to be able to pull every company system together to enable analysis and reporting at every company level. This was a process which often took many months and a huge investment before any tangible benefits were realised. 

Now, using Vena + Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you are able to pull together planning, budgeting, forecasting, analysis, and reporting across every aspect of your company without the significant additional costs and delays associated with additional bespoke systems and high user-adoption costs.

In short, Vena on its own takes Excel and elevates it to a fully managed database-driven solution that eliminates spreadsheet errors and provides a single, trusted source of financial truth. By adding Vena to Dynamics 365 Business Central, this capability is extended to every department across the entire organisation.   

Why This Should Be of Interest for FP&A Teams

The best FP&A Teams do not exist in a finance vacuum. Having the ability to easily analyse and report on your General Ledger is great, but every system in your company will have its own financial aspect which needs to be recorded and analysed to obtain the wider, moist accurate picture. 

This is particularly important when it comes to planning of course. Using Vena’s deep native access to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, your Marketing, Sales, and Operational departments can all plan based on real-time figures across the whole enterprise to deliver realistic and accurate Plans and Forecasts, all automated to ensure timely delivery for corporate analysis and reporting.

But that’s not all. By using Vena’s integrated Agentic AI, Vena Copilot, anyone within your organisation can analyse and report on data in real-time using information from all company systems in order to provide you with the most accurate and secure information for your reports. Non-financial employees can produce knowledgeable financial analyses and reports by asking Vena Copilot natural language questions and obtaining real-time answers in preparation for their next board report without troubling the FP&A Team.

Conclusion

For any company using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Vena Solutions is easily the best choice for your Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Reporting needs. It provides Excel-native FP&A directly to the people who need it the most and it achieves this in an intelligent way via Agentic AI. In summary, Vena:

• Integrates seamlessly & directly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
• Elevates Excel-Native FP&A by combining Excel's flexibility with enterprise-grade power & security.
• Automates key financial processes, enabling you to cut down cycle times and free up your team.
• Gain deeper business insights and make data-driven decisions with a single source of truth.
• Eliminates manual data transfers between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Excel.
• Automates your budgeting, forecasting, and reporting cycles.
• Delivers real-time insights within a single, reliable source of financial truth.
• Transforms your familiar Excel interface into a powerful, collaborative FP&A platform.
• Combines the flexibility you love with enterprise-grade data governance, streamlined workflows, and comprehensive audit trails.

Ultimately, it really comes down to something that is fundamental to Vena, and that is its Excel integration. Not just in itself, but the fact that it then means that all users – not just Finance users - can take ownership of the application, they can change it, they can modify it, and they can extend it themselves.