Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to achieve great success – such as when you benefit from an automated cash management solution.
Like a vineyard owner trying to rush his grapes to the winemaker after a successful harvest, you should start by picking the low-hanging fruit. For CFOs, FDs, Group Finance Function members, or corporate treasurers, you want to be targeting the quick cash and treasury management wins that pave the way for a triumphant future.
With treasury functions increasingly seen as having a unique set of skills to improve the bottom line, treasury professionals are being called upon to add value above and beyond cash management.
For the modern-day treasurer – who wrestles with traditional duties as well as board-imposed strategic expectations – this means being able to see, control, and optimise your working capital.
Your first thought for achieving global cash visibility and forecasting might be to turn to an ERP or TMS – but we’re here to tell you how an automated cash management solution such as AccessPay’s gets the job done better.
What Does it Mean to See, Control, and Optimise Your Cash?
| SEE: Real-time cash and liquidity reporting control | CONTROL: Treasury risk management | OPTIMISE: Executing profitable treasury tactics |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring and managing cash positions in real-time to produce daily and intra-day liquidity reports, as well as forecast overviews. | Identifying, evaluating, and managing interest rates, currencies, and commodity risks to minimise losses. | Adding value through process efficiency, improved working capital management, and interest optimisation. |
How Automated Cash Management Helps You See, Control, and Optimise
An automated cash management solution can help treasurers achieve all three of these ambitions by allowing you to keep a closer eye on cash and liquidity, minimise risk, and take advantage of investment opportunities to make profit.
Let’s break each section down for a closer look.
SEE: Real-Time Cash and Liquidity Reporting
Multi-Bank, Global Cash Visibility – Achieving timely cash visibility can take over a treasurer’s role.
Building up a picture of the company’s cash position through multiple CSV downloads, numerous spreadsheets, and hours of reconciliation is time-consuming. And it’s an even bigger task when you’re dealing with multiple banking systems or subsidiaries across the globe.
With multi-bank cash visibility via an automated cash management solution, treasures can gather group-wide cash positions and report on global liquidity requirements in real-time. Strategic decision-making is just around the corner for you and your business.
Coordinate and Configure Data – Wouldn’t life be easier if everything is organised just how you want it to appear? Analysts spend hours trying to patch together data so you can view the information, just the way you want it. Only to start all over again the following day.
With AccessPay’s Cash Management solution, data can be configured in real-time based on bank provider, currency, country, and organisational legal entity. Life’s much easier when you know what’s what and where’s where, huh?
Detection – Big data! We’ve all heard about the big promise that it holds for treasury and finance. Indeed, when it’s available in real-time and in a legible format, we can make decisions quickly.
However, as data sources grow, so does the need for anomaly detection. With finance data overflowing, detecting irregularities is difficult. And when you’re using a spreadsheet treasury model, working from sheet to sheet and tab to tab, it’s simply impossible.
Luckily for treasurers, an automated cash management solution can benchmark data against standard payments profiles. This helps users spot anomalies, missed opportunities, and areas for improvement. Perhaps there is some truth in this promise after all…
CONTROL: Treasury Risk Management
Minimise Loss – The emphasis on risk management has continued steadily since the start of the financial crisis. A decade on, treasurers have moved on from mere cash visibility reporting and expanded to include a more in-depth look at risk reduction.
Never before has there been greater justification for a firm to minimise losses than today. With a highly volatile macroeconomic environment and unstable foreign exchange rates, there’s a great emphasis on reporting that can allow you to act on findings positively and proactively.
By using a cash management solution for large exposure reporting, managing inter-company transfers, reducing negative credit interest, and minimising foreign exchange risks, treasurers can feel smug as they help to minimise losses with minimum effort.
Not only this, but a welcome pivot (ha) away from spreadsheets can and will drastically reduce the influence of human error, as well as dissuade internal fraud through increased transparency across the board.
Sweeping – Treasurers looking to optimise interest payments, minimise the cost of borrowing through surplus funds, or simply improve overall liquidity can do so by concentrating all their cash into one account, where the interest is at its highest.
Typically, this task requires routine manual input of payments, which is both error-prone and difficult to maintain. With no human intervention required, AccessPay’s automated Cash Management solution integrates directly with the payments engine to remove the need for manual sweeping tasks.
OPTIMISE: Executing Profitable Treasury Tactics
Analysis – To understand the structure of the finance and treasury function, treasury analysts need to gather real-time information on cash positions by region, currency, bank, and legal entity. This usually takes up a large amount of time when reconciling with spreadsheets or even a Treasury Management System, time better spent analysing data.
Cash management solutions shift the treasury role away from data gathering towards analysis and strategy execution. Routine tasks such as statement input and reconciliation are automated, allowing you to spend time on jobs that can improve your bottom line.
On-Demand – When you’re tasked to produce reports that contain complete, accurate, and up-to-date information on current cash positions or future liquidity forecasts, it can be frustrating tackling the many hurdles you face just to meet these requirements.
With AccessPay, it’s easy. Bespoke, organisational reporting requirements can be configured and delivered on-demand, allowing you to produce detailed reports containing the most up-to-date information.
Forecasting – With additional visibility and control over your working capital, your new-found data can be used to effectively conduct cash flow forecasting.
Whether you’re cash rich or finding yourself in constant shortfall, the importance of forecasting is evident and well-documented.
Investment Opportunities – We all know the benefits that Sweeping can provide to those looking to keep borrowing costs to a minimum, improve their liquidity position or optimise interest positions. However, this vision is for here and now, and not for the future. To achieve this, forecasting is essential.
With a Cash Management solution, you not only benefit from real-time data, but you can also produce forecasts based on regression analysis – allowing you to take early investment opportunities at preferential rates, make moves to hedge funds, and, ultimately, save money.
There Are No Downsides to an Automated Cash Management Solution
Once the vineyard owner takes his grapes to the winemaker his job is done for the season.
Unfortunately, for you and I, this isn’t the case. Treasury and finance professionals must meet these targets daily.
With AccessPay’s automated Cash Management solution, though, the job becomes a lot easier for the modern-day treasurer.