Decided you’ve had enough of manually downloading bank statements and updating spreadsheets?
Spend less time in spreadsheets and more on the work that drives your company’s strategy! Here’s what it looks like to automate your cash management with Trovata.
As a former CPA turned Trovata Community Manager, I’ll share everything you need to know about three of our core features: Balances, Transactions, and Analysis.
What to Know Before Signing Up
Before we get into the steps for creating your account, let’s go over some essential details to know about Trovata:
Trovata is a Secure Platform
When you connect your bank with Trovata, you don’t have to worry about risking your company’s sensitive information and data. We’re committed to protecting your information assets, exceeding standard security requirements. We are SOC-1 and SOC-2 certified, which means that we maintain a high level of information security. We continuously monitor the security of our infrastructure, network, data, product, app, and organization.
For a complete security overview, please visit our security page.
Why Trovata vs. a Bank Portal?
People often ask, “What is the difference between Trovata and my bank portal?” The answer is that our platform consolidates all of the info from your banks and accounts into one place. With our exceptional user experience and UI, you can evaluate cash flow activity more easily.
Trovata’s plans offer features that bank portals do not, such as automatic transaction categorization, report management, and forecast analysis, leading to tremendous time savings and enhanced decision-making.
Trovata Connects to Your Bank via Open Banking APIs
Bank APIs (application program interfaces) allow clients of financial institutions to get enhanced services from specialized software platforms like Trovata. It’s the technology that enables all of the benefits you’ll get from our platform.
In case you’re unfamiliar with them, here’s a brilliant way to understand APIs; think about depositing cash at a bank. If you wanted to do so, you could walk into the bank, crank open the vault using your arms, leave your money, and write a note in the ledger that detailed the deposit.
That could work—in theory—however, not everyone is strong enough to open a bank vault while others are bound to take advantage of the scenario to line their pockets. Instead, a trustworthy teller who is strong enough to open the door serves as an intermediary. The teller and the API share the same purpose: to facilitate the exchange and make it safer for both parties.
While API technology is not a new concept, US banks have recently begun opening up their APIs. Several of whom, like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Capital One, have partnered with Trovata to pioneer this technology. Some bank APIs, due to their setup and complexity, will enable you to connect more quickly than others, ranging from anywhere between one day to six weeks.
Now that you know that Trovata is secure, provides a single source of truth, and relies on open banking APIs, let’s see how you can get started.
How to Create Your Trovata Account and Connect Your Bank
You can get your Trovata instance up and running in just 4 simple steps:
- Create an account here.
- After creating a login and entering your personal information, select the “Business” option if your company generates up to $100 million in revenue annually. If it generates more than $100 million, select the “Enterprise option.”
- If you selected “Business,” proceed with your Plaid connection by finding your desired bank in the list and submitting your online portal credentials. If you selected “Enterprise,” Trovata will get in touch with you immediately to provide further assistance in connecting your bank account(s).
- After successfully completing the connection, your balance and transaction activity (bank data) will be ingested into Trovata.
Note: The ingestion process can take anywhere from 1-15 minutes. If your Trovata homepage is still loading after 15 minutes, please let us know by emailing support@trovata.io!
With your Trovata account, you will be able to use these features immediately: Balances, Transactions, and Analysis. Other advanced features like forecasting and insights are available for users with paid plans.
Now, let’s take a look at the features you can start using when you create your account:
Balances
“Balances” is the initial landing page in Trovata that provides an overview of your most current cash balance as well as a list of all banks and accounts that are connected to your instance.
From the Balances page, you can quickly create a current cash report, which is helpful for many reasons. One of which is you can obtain greater visibility for a grouping of accounts, ie; all restricted cash accounts.
Here is how you can create a current cash report:
1. Click “Balances” on the navigation menu to get started.
2. Select the add snack icon in the top right corner of the Balances page.
3. Click “Current Cash.”
4. After the new Current Cash configuration appears, input a name for the Current Cash snack, and configure the metric settings in the top section.
5. Use the search bar to find specific accounts you’d like to aggregate. Click the check mark to select an individual account, or click the checkmark in the heading to select all returned accounts. Finally, click the blue button to add the selected accounts into the calculation.
6. The sum of the selected accounts will populate in the middle section. Click “Done” to add your Current Cash object to the top carousel of the Balances page.
7. The report will then be pinned to the far right side of the Balances page carousel.
To further customize your cash report, click the three dots in the top right corner of a snack, allowing you to:
- Edit any of the Current Cash configuration fields
- Show/Hide the bar chart of historical values (last 7 days is fixed)
- Show/Hide the Account Type breakdown summary (ex: Operating, Investment, Other, Debt)
- Duplicate the Current Cash snack
- Remove the snack from the Balances page carousel
Watch this video for an in-depth tour of “Balances” and cash reports:
Transactions
The Transactions page lets you use a Google-like search bar to identify any transaction in your Trovata instance. You can combine the use of keywords from the transaction metadata and filters to make your search more specific.
Instantly find transactions related to things like account transfers, incoming and outgoing wires, payroll, AR/AP and more with a simple search, saving you time finding answers on historical details and amounts.
When you’re looking for specific transactions within Trovata, you can utilize any part of the transaction record to assist in your search.
Clicking on the transaction will expand its contents and reveal additional details. These details, otherwise known as metadata, can be used to create search terms in the search bar within the transactions section of Trovata.
Simply enter any word or group of words (word order matters) and hit enter. The result of your search will include any matches that occur in any data field within the transaction. You can make your search more specific by using quotation marks for exact searches, less than, equals, or greater than signs, date ranges, etc.
Play the video below for a more in-depth look at Trovata’s Transactions page:
Creating and Using Tags
In Trovata, you can get a better understanding of your cash activity with tags that can be included in reports, analysis, and forecasts.
Tags are unique identifiers created by users to identify specific transactions within a period of time, historically, or going forward, based on specific criteria.
Why Are Tags Important?
Tags allow you to organize your primary cash flows (transactions) into a more digestible format. They are also the foundation for building transaction-based reports, analyses, and forecasts.
How Do I Decide What to Tag?
Tag structures often differ between industries and business types, but we recommend starting with a simple hierarchy where each child tag is mapped to a parent “cash category” tag. It’s helpful to work backward, review your current reporting, and consider these questions:
- Are there specific reports that your team is manually pulling together based on specific transaction types?
- Are you manually tracking activity?
- Is management trying to understand relationships with specific vendors or customers?
Analysis
The “Analysis” tool allows you to identify and visualize trends within your balance and transaction data. Here, you can track daily balance and transaction changes with customizable data grouping and filtering options.
The analysis page empowers you to:
- Sift through your transaction and balance data to identify trends
- Test hypotheses
- Answer cash flow questions
- Visualize and create automated reports
Starting from the home screen, you can click on Reports and then click analysis. The two main types of analysis that Trovata offers are transactions and balances.
You can leverage transaction analysis to identify historical trends within various transaction categories.
On the other hand, balance analysis helps track the directionality of balances within various institutions and accounts.
Watch this video for a deeper explanation of Trovata’s Analysis page:
Manage Cash Like a Pro
At Trovata, we understand how important it is to drive a smart cash strategy to help your company weather a recession and safeguard against uncertainty.
With the power of open banking and modern cash platforms like Trovata, more teams can have access to the right tools that save them from spreadsheet drudgery, freeing them up to spend more time making smarter decisions.
If you haven’t yet, join some of the world’s leading brands, like Square and Krispy Kreme, and book a demo today!
