Even in the digital age, treasurers are still struggling to gain insights from their bank data that drive better, informed business decisions. In a 2021 survey conducted by Trovata and Treasury Dragons, 37% of treasurers still lack the budget and staff time needed to further optimize and digitally transform their cash management.
By discussing these top 5 best practices that bank APIs enable, you can convey the value of automation to key stakeholders and get more out of your bank data to support strategic growth initiatives.
Top 5 Best Practices for Making Better Business Decisions Using Bank APIs
- Automate Bank Data Delivery
- Increase the Cohesiveness of Your Finance Tools with ERP Integrations
- Create and Automate Tags to Gain Visibility Into Cash Across Institutions, Vendors, and Clients
- Take Cash Forecasting a Step Further by Planning for Multiple Scenarios
- Don’t Keep Your Bank Data Siloed
1. Automate Bank Data Delivery
In our daily life, consumers have gotten used to ‘always-on’ services. Any entertainment, financial management, or services are just a phone application away. The same cannot be said for treasurers, who are often still beholden to legacy technologies to manage cash in spreadsheets and outdated treasury management software platforms.
There’s a more effective and efficient solution to managing cash instead of having to collate data across a multitude of bank portals manually.
Bank APIs are revolutionizing how treasurers get data. These bank APIs connect directly to your global banking portals and automate the consolidation and normalization of your bank data into a Multi-Bank Data Lake™.
Within the Trovata platform, machine learning algorithms analyze this data, and distribute it amongst Trovata’s analytic tools like cash reporting and forecasting, empowering you to automate the generation of cash reports and forecasts based on the most up-to-date, historical bank data.
By automating your data entry point, your organization can prioritize strategic analysis that enables you to make data-backed decisions more efficiently.
2. Align Your Finance Tools with ERP Integrations
While having accurate, historic bank data stored in perpetuity is a critical step forward in better managing your cash flow throughout your business, it’s typically not your only data source. Most businesses utilize ERP software to manage their incoming AR and outgoing AP. A major difficulty is getting these data sources to play well together in order to provide you with a global view of your cash flow.
Fortunately, Trovata’s API Bank Connector™ integrates seamlessly with ERPs like Sage and NetSuite platforms, just to name a few. In Sage’s case, the outbound integration enables Sage users to self-administer aggregated bank data from key bank accounts into their Sage 100, 300, and Intacct platforms, eliminating rekeying and streamlining the reconciliation process to just a few clicks.
The inbound integration empowers Trovata Analytics Platform users to automatically pull open invoices, unpaid CC transactions, unapplied payments, and unpaid bills data from Sage via APIs into their Trovata instance, making it easier than ever to track and manage cash flow and payments in one, secure platform.
3. Create and Automate Tags to Gain Visibility Into Cash Across Institutions, Vendors, and Clients
With bank APIs, it is now easier than ever to categorize and segment transactions, empowering deep analysis of your cash across institutions, vendors, and clients. Machine learning and artificial intelligence analyze your bank data and recommend relevant tags based on patterns found across your bank accounts.
As well, you can perform a simple Natural Language Search and be provided a list of transactions from key vendors, institutions, clients, and transaction-types within milliseconds.
Any custom search can be saved as tags, which can be leveraged for any future cash reporting, analysis, and forecasting. These reports can be added to custom dashboards, amplifying your ability to track cash movement and even forecast predictive cash flow. Ultimately, this helps you do your job better and discover future threats and growth opportunities across various channels.
4. Take Your Cash Forecasting a Step Further by Planning for Multiple Scenarios
Not only does Trovata automate your forecast baseline, but it can also help you navigate geopolitical threats, a changing economy, emerging growth opportunities, and the consideration of entering new market segments. Scenario planning can enable you to see the view these different decisions could have on future cash flow, empowering you to craft and implement cash management plans as situations occur.
Trovata gives you the flexibility to apply growth rates and variables to your automated forecasts, so you can easily and accurately forecast around changing scenarios, business decisions, and potential investments. These scenarios can be saved as their own forecast and added to custom dashboards, amplifying your ability to efficiently track how market changes and business decisions in one place.
5. Don’t Keep Your Bank Data Siloed
The problem with relying on disparate systems and spreadsheets for a process as critical as cash management is that key stakeholders often find themselves with an incomplete view of their cash flow. An automated cash management platform, like Trovata, changes that, arming your organization with a single platform that features the most up-to-date bank data. The best part: reports are easily accessible to key stakeholders via both desktop and mobile.
“Before Trovata, our [finance and] accounting teams needed separate logins for all of our different bank accounts and they struggled to find the transactions they were looking for. With Trovata, they can now search for transactions by keywords and find what they are looking for instantaneously with just one single login.”
– Steven Podwell, Senior Treasury Analyst at Eventbrite
With Trovata, everyone can look at the same data and bring their unique perspectives to the table. This helps to foster creative solutions to complex problems, reduce data visibility issues, and eliminate decision-making based on incomplete stories.
Simplify Cash Management with the Trovata Platform, Built on Bank APIs
Trovata, the next-gen, automated cash management platform provides unified access to the richest banking information available from all your bank providers, empowering you to make better, quicker data-driven decisions.
By aggregating your cash and transaction data with open banking APIs, and collecting that data into a Mult-Bank Data Lake™, you can eliminate manual data entry and automate your cash reporting and forecasting.
Download the Trovata Platform Data Sheet to learn how you can empower your team with aggregated bank data across your global bank accounts or book a demo today.
