Financial teams may still rely heavily on Excel, but multinational businesses increasingly need something more sophisticated than spreadsheets to close their books. Vena Solutions has made Vena Financial Consolidation generally available, adding an advanced multi-entity consolidation engine to its Microsoft-native finance platform while retaining the Excel interface many finance professionals already use.
Vena Turns Excel Into a More Governed Financial Consolidation Platform
Excel remains deeply embedded in corporate finance—even as finance departments adopt cloud ERP systems, FP&A software and AI.
Vena’s latest move is built around that contradiction.
The company has launched Vena Financial Consolidation, an Excel-native solution designed for organizations dealing with complex multi-entity structures, multiple currencies, ownership models and demanding financial reporting requirements. Rather than asking finance teams to abandon Excel, Vena is attempting to put stronger consolidation controls and automation behind the familiar interface.
That distinction matters because financial consolidation sits at a particularly sensitive point in the enterprise technology stack. The process turns individual entities’ financial results into a consolidated view used by executives, investors, auditors and regulators. Errors, unexplained adjustments or weak audit trails can therefore become much more consequential than an ordinary spreadsheet mistake.
Vena’s own 2026 FP&A Impact Report found that 90% of surveyed finance professionals still use Microsoft Excel for modeling and reporting. The figure illustrates why Excel remains difficult for finance software vendors to displace, even as organizations modernize their technology stacks.
The problem is not necessarily Excel itself. It is what happens around it as organizations become larger and more complicated.
Consolidation is becoming an orchestration problem
Vena Financial Consolidation targets processes including intercompany matching and eliminations, multi-currency translation, ownership and equity structures, and top-side adjustments.
It also adds workflow controls, versioning, period locking, entity-level security, audit history and data provenance. Those capabilities are aimed at creating a traceable record of how a consolidated number was produced.
That becomes increasingly important as AI enters financial workflows.
An AI system can identify a variance or generate an explanation quickly, but finance leaders still need to establish whether the underlying data is trustworthy and whether the system applied the correct accounting rules. For CFO organizations, explainability and auditability are therefore becoming as important as automation.
Vena is extending that idea through Vena AI, which the company says can use financial and consolidation context to help identify variances, investigate breaks and produce executive-level insights.
The strategy is similar to a broader shift underway across enterprise software: AI is moving from an isolated assistant toward an intelligence layer sitting on top of governed business processes.
Vena’s Microsoft-native approach
The company’s biggest differentiator is arguably not consolidation itself. Vendors including Oracle, SAP, Workday, OneStream and Anaplan already address different parts of the enterprise performance management and financial planning market.
Vena instead emphasizes its position within the Microsoft ecosystem and its Excel-native user experience.
For organizations standardized on Microsoft 365, this can reduce the behavioral change associated with introducing a new finance application. Finance professionals can continue working in an environment they understand while the underlying platform handles governance and complex consolidation logic.
That is an increasingly relevant proposition as finance departments attempt to modernize without disrupting established month-end and reporting processes.
The competitive trade-off is clear, however. Dedicated enterprise performance management platforms can provide broad financial planning, consolidation and reporting capabilities, while ERP vendors can tightly integrate financial consolidation with transactional systems. Vena’s opportunity is to compete on usability, Excel familiarity and the ability to connect planning and close without forcing finance teams into an entirely different working model.
Connecting close to planning
The launch also expands Vena’s broader strategy around what it calls Orchestrated Planning, Decisioning and Close.
Historically, consolidation, FP&A, reporting and management analysis have often been supported by different tools. That fragmentation creates handoffs between actual financial results, forecasts and management reporting.
Vena wants those processes to exist in a more continuous workflow.
Organizations can deploy Financial Consolidation independently, but Vena also allows consolidated actuals to feed into planning and reporting within its platform. In theory, that reduces reconciliation between systems and gives finance teams a clearer line from what happened to what should happen next.
This is where the technology becomes more strategically interesting than another consolidation product.
A CFO does not ultimately need a faster consolidation process simply for the sake of closing the books. The value comes from shortening the distance between financial close, analysis, forecasting and decision-making.
Vena says OEG uses its platform to consolidate more than 90 entities across 19 currencies. Other customers, including Capstone Infrastructure and Tanger Outlets, have reportedly reduced month-end close times by as much as 50%.
Those customer claims are meaningful but should be viewed as individual outcomes rather than evidence of a universal productivity gain.
AI raises the stakes for trusted financial data
Vena is also building an AI layer around the financial data created by these processes.
Its Vena AI capabilities are designed to help finance teams explain changes and surface insights, while future Vena Omega capabilities are expected to incorporate technology from Vena’s acquisition of Morpheo AI.
The underlying strategy reflects a larger enterprise AI reality: models become considerably more useful when they operate on structured, governed and context-rich organizational data.
For CFOs, that means the consolidation system could increasingly become more than a compliance mechanism. It can become part of the data foundation used by AI systems to answer questions such as why revenue changed, which business units are underperforming and what assumptions are driving the forecast.
But that opportunity comes with a requirement for disciplined governance.
Finance leaders adopting AI-enabled consolidation should examine data lineage, access controls, audit trails, model behavior and human approval processes alongside traditional functionality such as currency translation and intercompany eliminations.
Vena’s launch ultimately reflects a broader transformation in finance technology. The future of financial consolidation may not be about replacing Excel outright. It may be about making the familiar finance environment capable of operating with the controls, automation and intelligence expected from modern enterprise software.
Market Landscape
The finance technology market is converging around three major requirements: automation, governance and connected planning.
Traditional EPM platforms such as Oracle and SAP compete through breadth and deep integration with enterprise financial systems. Anaplan focuses heavily on connected planning, while Microsoft continues to strengthen the broader ecosystem around Dynamics 365, Excel, Power BI and Azure. Salesforce also increasingly positions data and AI as interconnected enterprise capabilities.
Vena’s position is narrower but distinctive: bringing sophisticated planning and consolidation capabilities into a Microsoft-centric, Excel-native workflow.
The opportunity is significant because finance organizations are under pressure to accelerate the close while improving controls and providing faster insight to business leaders. At the same time, generative AI is increasing demand for clean, governed enterprise data.
The result is a shift from financial reporting software toward financial decision infrastructure. Consolidation is increasingly becoming the foundation for AI-assisted analysis, forecasting and executive decision-making rather than an isolated back-office process.
Top Insights
- Vena Financial Consolidation adds advanced multi-entity consolidation, currency translation and governance while preserving Excel workflows for complex enterprise finance teams.
- The platform connects consolidated actuals with planning and reporting, potentially reducing reconciliation and manual handoffs between core finance processes.
- Vena’s Microsoft-native strategy differentiates it from broader ERP and EPM competitors by retaining Excel as the primary finance-user experience.
- AI capabilities make data provenance and auditability more important as finance teams increasingly use intelligent systems to explain financial performance.
- CFO organizations adopting consolidation technology should evaluate governance, lineage, security and AI controls alongside automation and close-speed improvements.
Get in touch with our fintech expert
