The data you’re working with was a day old when you got it. Your boss needs the report for a board presentation at 10 am tomorrow. You notice it’s 10 pm. You begin to panic as you continue to scrape around in Excel.
You try to clean transaction and cash data, normalize currencies, and build a report to pinpoint which payments have cleared or whether your investment has paid off. This isn’t generating insights; instead, it’s generating a headache. Your business deserves better. You deserve better.
Let’s step back for a moment to understand what treasury management really is and how to begin building a treasury management strategy that is repeatable and scalable.
Why Legacy Treasury Management Systems Just Don’t Cut It Anymore
Treasury management involves optimizing the liquidity of a business while minimizing financial and operational risk. If we stay focused on this goal, can we truthfully say that legacy TMS solutions are helping us well into the 21st Century? The business climate has changed dramatically compared to when these systems were conceived.
Many treasurers now work from home, manage virtual accounts, and navigate changing regulatory environments and global supply chains.
Solutions that require manual workflows won’t cut it anymore.
Businesses in today’s fast-moving digital world must be nimble, embrace agility, and make more with less. Trovata can empower you to accomplish these goals, reinforce a culture of growth, and help you expand into new markets or products, or services.
There’s no need to fight against your treasury management system any longer. Gain deeper insights into your cash position and cash flow with these treasury management best practices:
Start with Real-Time Data
There’s a futility in trying to make data-driven decisions with data that was old before you began. By manually consolidating and normalizing your cash and transaction data, you are making predictions based on old data. Making critical business decisions from yesterday’s data or, worse, last month’s can lead to undesirable results like financial losses or a cash crisis.
Was your current treasury management system designed back when FTP was the hot new thing? When people went online by way of a CD that was mailed to them? You don’t have to work that way anymore, as there’s a better way to manage your treasury operations.
Stay Flexible
The creakingly old data architecture underpinning many treasury management systems was built with a one-size-fits-all approach. Sure, during the incredibly involved setup process that included half your IT department, you got to customize some transaction categories. What happens when those categories need to change? When you need to manage some virtual accounts? When the business environment itself evolves dramatically?
Once you’ve implemented your TMS, making on-the-fly changes is nearly impossible, and any system customizations require a heavy lift from your IT team.
You need a solution that encourages customization and creates a no-penalty environment for exploring, organizing, and personalizing your data. A platform that provides out-of-the-box, automated cash reporting, and forecasting tools that can be personalized to your individual organization’s needs.
Streamline and Automate
It’s fantastic to know the deep inner workings of repetitive tasks, like bank transaction consolidation. Still, as your organization grows, automating is critical to ensure you have access to real-time, accurate data.
A system that automatically normalizes your bank data and then segments your transactions through machine learning empowers you to discover deep insights into your cash flows in minutes.
Generating vendor transaction reports, which could spin into an all-nighter, takes five minutes in a system that allows you to dissect your data with no manual work or penalties.
Eliminating manual reporting in Excel empowers you to spend more time understanding your organization’s cash flow, finding trends in payables and receivables, and diving into liquidity management.
Stay Safe
Does your treasury management system require people to export banking information and work with it locally on their own computer in order to generate simple day-to-day reports?
Those Excel files filled with banking information are a security risk and can lead to inaccurate data due to managing it in disparate spreadsheets.
An Alternative to Legacy Treasury Management Systems
The best treasury management solution for generating powerful insights into your cash flow might not be a treasury management system. Managing your liquidity successfully requires a solution that provides real-time, accurate cash insights at a glance by aggregating your cash and transaction data into a single platform.
Trovata, our Open Banking Platform built on flexible modern architecture, automates and streamlines your cash reporting and forecasting to enable you to identify the cash you need to pay off short-term investments and debts at any given time in a matter of minutes instead of days.
Download our Building Tomorrow’s Treasury guide to discover how digitizing your treasury operations through an Open Banking Platform can empower your organization to drive fast, data-driven decision-making with access to instant, in-depth cash insights.
