Rarebreed scales FP&A with Vena and extends planning in Power BI to 130 practice managers

At a glance

Company: Rarebreed Veterinary Partners
Industry: Veterinary services
Size: 2,000+ employees, 100+ hospitals
Team: Four-person Finance/FP&A team
Solution: Vena + Acterys
Use cases: Budgeting, OPEX planning, workforce planning, revenue planning, forecasting
Environment: NetSuite, Vena, Power BI

Rarebreed Veterinary Partners was founded in 2018 with a vision to reimagine the veterinary work experience. Headquartered in Portland, Maine, the company has grown into a network of more than 100 veterinary hospitals supported by a central team providing leadership, technology and resources.

That growth has transformed the demands placed on Rarebreed’s Finance team. Vena first gave the team a scalable FP&A foundation for detailed budgeting and planning. Now Rarebreed is taking the next step with Acterys, turning the Power BI dashboards already used by practice managers from a read-only experience into a planning surface where they can contribute directly to the process.

The Challenge

When Kendall Kothe, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, joined Rarebreed in 2020, the company had just seven veterinary practices.

“When I came into the company, I was brought on to stand up the finance team,” Kendall said. “We were a startup company.”

Individual practices were still largely reporting through QuickBooks, while Rarebreed was bringing the business onto NetSuite. Producing group-level information meant manually bringing data together, a process that Kendall knew would become increasingly difficult as the company acquired more hospitals.

Rarebreed needed an FP&A environment that could standardize its approach without becoming another short-term solution. It also needed to fit the way Finance already worked.

“We knew we needed something that would really standardize our FP&A platform as we merged everybody from QuickBooks into NetSuite,” Kendall said. “We knew it would grow with us.”

Following a recommendation from Rarebreed’s NetSuite consultants and an evaluation of several options, the team selected Vena. Its Excel-based experience gave Finance a familiar way to work while providing the centralized planning environment the growing company needed.

Building a scalable FP&A foundation with Vena

As Rarebreed expanded, so did the sophistication of its planning.

Today, Vena supports annual budgeting at the individual hospital level, workforce planning using data from Paylocity, revenue planning by provider, OPEX planning and other detailed Finance processes. Vena data also feeds Rarebreed’s broader Power BI environment, where practice managers and other field users consume financial and operational performance reports and dashboards.

That foundation has helped a remarkably lean team keep pace with the business. Rarebreed now has more than 100 hospitals, while its Finance team remains four people, with three team members handling much of the detailed planning work.

The improvement is not simply about handling more locations. Rarebreed’s budgeting has been able to become more detailed and participative as the company has grown.

“Before Vena, we were only able to prepare very high-level budgets in standalone Excel spreadsheets and hand them over,” Kendall said. “We’ve evolved so much in the years that we’ve worked with the Vena platform.”

Rarebreed has also automated recurring analytical work. Detailed reported and pro forma views that previously required data to be assembled from different systems can now be rolled forward within Vena.

According to Kendall, reporting of that kind previously took “a day, maybe a day and a half to build.” Today, the team can roll forward detailed views covering reported and pro forma P&L, invoices, supplemental revenue, balance sheet and cash flow information.

But as Rarebreed’s FP&A foundation matured, another constraint became clear.

The next challenge: scaling planning participation

Rarebreed originally considered bringing hospital leaders directly into Vena. Instead, the company found a clearer division of roles: Vena’s Excel planning surface became the core FP&A environment for Finance, while Power BI became the familiar interface for practice managers and field operations.

The challenge was that Power BI, where reports and performance are viewed and analyzed by users, is read-only by default.

Practice managers could review their area’s budget and actual performance in Power BI, but when they needed to make a change or adjust a forecast, they had to export the data into shared but disparate spreadsheets. Finance then had to reconcile and enter 130 practice manager’s changes, save them, refresh the Power BI dashboard for the field. Another change could start the cycle again.

“We had three people inputting all of the plan data and all of the changes coming from more than 100 hospitals,” Kendall explained, “creating a growing bottleneck.”

For a group of hospitals, a single round could mean more than 100 individual changes. Kendall said processing those changes could take Finance as long as a week before field teams saw the updated picture.

At the same time, Rarebreed recognized that practice managers were better positioned to own many of those plans and assumptions.

“Practice Managers are operationally closer to their budgets than we are, so we wanted to continue to get their direct input, just without the manual spreadsheet gymnastics on our end,” Kendall said.

Extending Vena with planning in Power BI with Acterys

When Rarebreed learned about Acterys’ planning and write-back inside Power BI that practice managers already use, the team saw a way to address that participation gap without asking practice managers to adopt an unfamiliar planning environment.

“When Acterys came up, we thought, awesome, planning inside our Power Bi is the perfect fit for us,” Kendall said.

Rarebreed is beginning with OPEX planning in Power BI for its 2027 budget cycle. The goal is to allow practice managers to enter their own OPEX assumptions through an interface they already use regularly, and be able to see how those decisions affect their budget in real-time. Their inputs write-back directly to Rarebreed’s governed enterprise data, no shared files, no Finance re-keying, no separate reconciliation step.

For Mariam Bolkvadze, Rarebreed’s Finance Manager, that ability to move beyond read-only Power BI was central to the decision.

“With Acterys, what’s exciting is that our managers can input their plans, and assumptions in Power BI themselves right where they already work every day,” Mariam said. “They can input,  update, and see how it impacts their entire P&L before submitting a final number.”

The new process is also designed to introduce greater detail. Rarebreed plans to take parts of OPEX planning from the general ledger level down to individual vendors, giving practice managers more context about the costs behind their plans.

The aim is not simply to transfer data entry from one group to another. Rarebreed wants practice managers to understand how operational decisions affect the complete financial picture, while allowing Finance to spend less time re-entering changes and more time reviewing and challenging the plan.

From entering the plan to acting on it

For Rarebreed, success with Acterys will mean changing the respective roles of Finance and field operations; the field contributing directly in Power BI while Finance keeps control of the model and the process.

Practice managers will take greater ownership of the operational assumptions and plans they understand best. Finance will continue preparing and governing the planning process, but the team expects to spend less time entering field changes and more time working with practice leaders on what those numbers mean.

“We want to automate as much as we can in terms of manual planning work and then really have more strategic and meaningful conversations that make an impact across the business,” Mariam said.

That represents the next stage of the same scalability journey Rarebreed began with Vena: using technology not simply to process more work, but to change the quality of the work Finance and Operational teams can do.

What’s Next

OPEX is the first phase of Rarebreed’s Acterys roadmap. Once the team has established that process, Kendall said “We see the opportunity to extend our planning in Power BI  into revenue, cost of goods sold and cost of service planning.”

Longer term, she also sees potential for practice managers to reforecast during the year and model scenarios directly in Power BI, connecting changing operational assumptions with their financial impact.

The destination is a more participative planning model in which Vena provides Rarebreed’s Finance team with its established FP&A foundation, while Acterys extends planning into the Power BI environment already familiar to the field.

“With Acterys planning and write-back in Power BI, we get the best of both worlds,” Kendall said.

Results

• A four-person Finance team now supports detailed FP&A across more than 100 veterinary hospitals.
• Recurring detailed reporting, such as trailing 12-month pro forma metrics, that previously took 1 to 1.5 days to assemble are now rolled forward dynamically in Vena.
• Vena provides Rarebreed’s core FP&A environment while Power BI gives field operations a familiar interface for financial and operational information.
• Rarebreed is extending planning in Power BI with Acterys, beginning with OPEX planning, and adding revenue, cost of goods sold, and cost of service thereafter.
• The longer-term goal is to give practice managers greater ownership of planning inputs in Power BI where they work while allowing Finance to plan in Vena’s familiar Excel surface, and focus more of its time on analysis and business partnership.