One of the key questions many finance professionals face is: “how can you gain full cash visibility for your business?”
Many, however, are not aware that there are numerous methods available to help corporates achieve this, and the method most suitable to your organisation will depend on various factors like the number of banks you manage, the technology you use and the budget you have available to you.
We’ve pulled together an overview of the four ways you’re able to achieve full cash visibility for your business so you can determine what’s right for you, and no matter the solution, we can support you on that journey.
So, let’s explore them…
1. The Manual Process
Probably the most common play; this involves logging in to online banking portals to retrieve opening balances across all your main accounts and documenting them on a spreadsheet before starting your daily positioning. Repeat this process across all your accounts/currencies and you’re almost done. Now you know how much money you’re expected to have in each account, it’s time to move your funds to cover any overdrafts and consolidate your long balances.
This approach is only really viable for organisations with either a small number of accounts or plenty of resources. Depending on the scale, this approach requires significant investment in resource which could be better allocated towards more value-add projects. Some risks come with relying on humans for data entry. Despite stringent checks, mistakes can still slip through the cracks, which can seriously impact decisions made on incorrectly recorded balances.
2. Cash Visibility without a TMS
If your main objective is full cash visibility, you need the right tools for the job, but you don’t need a TMS. Many TMS providers promote cash visibility functionality as a free add-on or at discounted rates. While offers like these may seem like a steal, adopting a TMS for the sole point of achieving full cash visibility is an expensive, even counterproductive solution to the problem. Particularly if you have more than a handful of accounts to manage but aren’t equipped with vast resources and budgets.
Standalone cash visibility tools like AccessPay exist to solve this problem for mid-size corporates with smaller treasury teams or global finance functions. They consolidate your global banks and accounts into a single view, giving you the information you need on your cash position at a much lower cost, and are much easier to implement by seamlessly integrating between current systems and your bank accounts
Read more about our cash management solution here.
3. Connect Your Legacy TMS via Embedded Corporate Banking
Just because your business benefits from a Treasury Management System (TMS) doesn’t mean you’re able to reap the rewards of real-time, full cash visibility. In fact, if you’re using a legacy TMS there’s a good chance it isn’t drastically increasing your cash visibility at all. Bank exposure, payment reconciliation, and hedging of currencies – are all the activities where a TMS provides value. But if your TMS has no way of connecting to your banking partners using SWIFT MT messages or other means, then receiving daily and intraday statement data into your TMS is another obstacle you need to overcome.
The good news is that if your current TMS doesn’t connect to your banks, you don’t need to invest in a new one. Embedded Corporate Banking solutions like AccessPay can modernise legacy systems by acting as the middleware which feeds real-time bank data into your TMS, providing the data needed to surface your cash position. This option can save considerable time and investment for corporates looking to get more from their existing TMS, without having to go to tender for a new system.
What is ‘Embedded Corporate Banking?’
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4. The Modern TMS
Some Treasury Management Systems do it all: payments, reconciliation, hedging, and the bank connectivity needed to achieve a real-time view of your cash. But there’s a catch. They’re a huge investment, requiring the same amount of budget you’d need for a brand new ERP implementation. The six-figure contracts make this option a luxury often only reserved for businesses with hefty budgets to splurge on their finance function.
What have we learned?
Now that we’ve summarised the 4 ways you can achieve full cash visibility for your business, let’s discuss where we come in.
How Does AccessPay’s Cash Visibility Tool Help You?
While a simple concept, achieving effective cash visibility can be a complicated and costly endeavour. Without a single source of truth, it’s difficult to make decisions based on the cash available to your business. But the future of cash visibility lies in embedded corporate banking. Consolidating live transaction data across your banking estate and translating it to meaningful analytics will help corporates stay one step ahead of expenditure, debt repayment, and investment opportunities.
AccessPay is at the forefront of this movement, helping corporates connect banks to finance and treasury applications to unlock better banking services and ultimately drive better business decisions. If you’d like to learn more about how embedded corporate banking can drive your business forward, get in touch today.
