Excel First Planning for Midmarket Finance

Vena won by treating Excel as the user interface, not the system of record. That matters because finance teams did not want to rebuild years of spreadsheet habits, they wanted the same grids and formulas with a safer layer underneath. Vena connected Excel models to a central database, added role based access and workflow, and pulled live data from ERP, CRM, and HR systems, turning a personal spreadsheet into a shared planning system for mid market finance teams.

• The practical pain was monthly planning by email. Teams copied files, broke formulas, and merged department inputs by hand. Comparable FP&A founders describe finance spending one or two days each month moving CSVs, refreshing actuals, and reconciling changes across versions.
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• Vena’s product choice sits in a clear market bucket. Causal grouped Vena with tools like Datarails and Cube that stay on top of Excel or Sheets, adding integrations, dashboards, permissions, and workflow instead of asking finance to abandon spreadsheets entirely.
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• This also explains Vena’s customer sweet spot. At about $60,000 annual contract value, it serves mid market companies that need more control than raw Excel but do not want the cost and process weight of platforms like Anaplan or OneStream, which can run $300,000 to $450,000 per year.
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The next step is expanding the same Excel centered system beyond core budgeting into sales, headcount, and operational planning. As Vena deepens ties to Microsoft 365, Power BI, PowerPoint, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Business Central, the product becomes harder to replace because it sits inside the tools finance already uses every day while widening the set of planning jobs it can own.