Inception of VeeRa

VeeRa is a modern cloud-based solution for budget planning and execution monitoring above all for the public sector and major organisations.

VeeRa’s motto is “Preparing a budget is not rocket science!”

By 2016, the cooperation of the founders of VeeRa with Estonian local governments created a tool to aid with a process consuming considerable time and resources. According to an analysis by the Ministry of Finance, budgeting and reporting takes up one-third of the entire working time in financial services. That is a lot.

Cooperation between the public sector and the private sector resulted in the creation of a cloud-based solution for organising budgetary work – the virtual budgetary application VeeRa. The application was initially only meant for planning public sector budgets in order to create a convenient information channel between separate units and departments. Cooperation with local governments that focused on the organisation of financial management and interviews with dozens of professionals who come into contact with budgeting every day became the foundations of VeeRa’s architecture. The application brings simplicity and accuracy to the financial matters of local governments, rendering the work of officials more convenient and humane when planning the budget.

VeeRa does not need to be a tool merely for specialists who are extremely knowledgeable with regard to finance and Excel. It is important for us that the smart solution would be a pleasant tool for the managers of sub-units of organisations (e.g. the managers of schools, nursery schools, cultural and sports institutions, etc.) An increase in the level of responsibility of employees is also an important result for us.

There is a big difference in whether the budget is prepared in the office of the CFO on the basis of verbally communicated information or the manager of each unit enters their own expenses. When planning the budget in VeeRa, the manager of each sub-unit is able to provide context to the numbers either by commenting them or adding a respective price proposal. This creates a situation where the responsibility for financial planning and use becomes clearer and more transparent and can be linked to individuals.

The administrative reform brought about an interesting challenge: how to combine those that cannot be combined? The financial managers of the merged local governments were facing many budgets with different structures and contents. These needed to be combined in a short period of time into a new budget in a manner to ensure that it would be based in the aggregate data of the previous years. Ordinary Excel tables would be miles long in this case, and countless hours of working and rest hours would be spent on comparing the numbers. We did not have this situation in mind when developing VeeRa, but we were all the more happier and surprised to see VeeRa handle this complex task with ease.

Joint budgetary rules (structures) definitely need to be agreed on in advance in order to launch the solution. Then the budgets of all the parties must be translated pursuant to the new rules and the data must be fed into VeeRa. Now it’s time to relax and enjoy working since all the previous numbers are at hand and comparable with the amounts planned for the subsequent periods.

Our first customers joined VeeRa in 2017. Since then, VeeRa has also shown itself as a strong asset in budgetary negotiations as the matter of the content itself is likewise always discussed in addition to numbers. VeeRa can be used for constantly sharing information with different parties top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top. The possibilities of VeeRa can be applied in internal and public discussions, e.g. when preparing participatory budgeting.