Aligning treasury and accounting teams requires more than just basic visibility into cash, payments, and liquidity. They require real-time, cross-functional insights to collaborate effectively, and support the growth and financial stability of their organizations.
As Nick Groves, Finance Transformation Leader from PwC says, “The finance function sits at the center of an organization and has a key role to play – putting trusted strategic insight in the hands of key decision-makers and harnessing data to power intelligent and informed planning and business decisions.”
But traditional, siloed methods of working often create barriers that hinder their ability to collaborate effectively.
Without integrated systems and easy access to accurate, real-time data, both treasury and accounting teams face challenges in achieving the unified financial visibility they need to make informed decisions.
Manual workflows, delayed data, and ERP limitations further complicate the process, leaving both teams in the dark. Modern treasury technology offers a way forward.
By simplifying cash management and enabling collaboration between treasury and accounting, these tools ensure teams can align on their shared goals while freeing up time for higher-value work.
Let’s take a closer look at the essential tools and strategies for aligning treasury and accounting to unlock unified visibility and value.
The Importance of Aligning Treasury and Accounting
When treasury and accounting teams collaborate effectively, the benefits go much further than ensuring the numbers add up. As Nick Groves states, alignment across every aspect of the finance and treasury functions allow them to become strategic drivers of organizational growth and risk management.
A well-aligned team, working from a unified set of real-time financial data, can optimize cash flow, ensure liquidity, and provide better insights for capital allocation and investments.
By having shared visibility into transactions, payments, and liquidity, treasury and accounting can identify opportunities for growth while minimizing financial risks, allowing the company to make more informed, strategic decisions.
Efficient collaboration also helps manage compliance and audit processes, providing a clear, real-time view of cash movements and financial health. When both teams are in sync, they can respond quickly to market conditions, adjust financial strategies in real-time, and maintain the organization’s financial stability.
How a Lack of Visibility Hinders Collaboration
One of the biggest challenges treasury and accounting teams face is the lack of real-time visibility into financial data. Without a centralized system to provide a single source of truth, both teams are often working from incomplete or outdated information.
This data visibility gap complicates daily operations and undermines the organization’s ability to make quick, informed decisions.
ERP Limitations
ERP systems, while essential for many larger, enterprise-level companies, often fall short when it comes to providing the real-time, granular insights treasury needs. Most ERPs focus on accounting and general ledger management, but they lack the ability to provide instant updates on cash flows, payments, and liquidity.
This delay leaves treasury teams in the dark, waiting for end-of-day data (or even end-of-week) or manual inputs, and prevents accounting from having a clear, near real-time view of the organization’s financial health.
Delayed Reconciliation and Reporting
When data isn’t visible in real-time, reconciliation and financial reporting processes become slower and more prone to errors. Without instant access to transactions and cash balances, treasury may take longer to match transactions with the accounting team’s records, delaying reporting cycles.
This gap in visibility increases the risk of errors and discrepancies, forcing both teams to spend time troubleshooting instead of focusing on more value-added tasks.
Fragmented Data Sources
Treasury and accounting teams often rely on different systems, portals, and spreadsheets to gather the data they need. Treasury may pull data from multiple bank portals, while accounting works within the ERP.
This fragmented approach means both teams are constantly working to consolidate and reconcile information manually, making it difficult to collaborate effectively. The lack of a centralized, real-time view of all financial data not only hinders day-to-day operations but also creates silos that prevent treasury and accounting from working together as efficiently as possible.
These visibility challenges prevent treasury and accounting from making timely, strategic decisions.
The Treasury Cheat Sheet For Seamless Collaboration
So, how does treasury overcome these challenges to become a valuable strategic partner to accounting? Here’s a list of key tools and practices that can transform how your treasury and accounting teams work together.
1. Centralized, Real-Time Data with Direct Bank Connectivity
This is the foundation of better collaboration. To eliminate data silos and delays, your teams need a single, centralized platform that provides real-time visibility into all financial transactions and banking data. Solutions like Trovata offer direct bank connectivity, which pulls data from all your bank accounts (whether through API, H2H, or SWIFT) and automatically normalizes it.
With real-time access to cash positions, both treasury and accounting teams can work from the same up-to-date information, speeding up reconciliation and financial reporting.
“Trovata provides the cash visibility I need when I need it. If my CFO asks how collections look the past month, I can quickly access that data in Trovata and rely on it, instead of having to manually consolidate a bunch of reporting data.”
Tim DilLillo – Sr. Director of Treasury and Investor Relations at GoTo
With Trovata synthesizing all bank data into one centralized platform, treasury and accounting teams gain a single source of truth for financial data. No more logging into multiple bank portals or manually consolidating spreadsheets. Both teams can instantly access real-time cash balances, transaction flows, and other critical financial data in one place.
This unified view supports better collaboration, faster decision-making, and improved financial forecasting, allowing both treasury and accounting to operate more strategically and efficiently.
2. Customizable Tagging
It’s a simple thing which can be deceptively complex to implement. Categorizing transactions in a consistent and meaningful way is a linchpin for collaboration between treasury and accounting.
Trovata’s customizable tagging system allows you to assign transactions to specific categories or general ledger account codes, aligning data across both teams. This approach reduces errors and discrepancies, making it easier to reconcile accounts and track cash flow accurately.
By setting up shared tags, both teams can have a clear understanding of each transaction’s purpose, improving the accuracy of financial statements. Best of all, this process can happen automatically, creating a consistent and scalable approach to transaction categorization.
3. The Right Search Tools
Finding specific transactions can be one of the most time-consuming and manual tasks to complete. Having a tool that allows this to be done quickly and easily goes a long way to making the finance function more efficient, and helps treasury and accounting work better together.
Trovata’s TQL search offers a Google-like search experience, allowing both treasury and accounting teams to quickly locate transactions based on tags, amounts, or other key criteria.
Whether you need to identify a payroll outflow or track down a large payment, this tool saves time and makes financial data more accessible. With instant search results, both teams can quickly resolve discrepancies and ensure transactions are accurately reflected in financial reports.
4. Efficient Entity Management
Managing multiple entities, regions, or divisions can complicate cash management and financial reporting. Having in place a system that allows for multi-entity organizations to be managed efficiently will go a long way to creating seamless collaboration.
Trovata simplifies this by allowing you to assign bank accounts to specific subsidiaries, concentrations, or locations, consolidating data in a way that gives both treasury and accounting full visibility into cash flow at every level.
This makes it easier to generate reports, manage liquidity, and ensure compliance across the organization, and removes the potential for confusion or miscommunication between departments.
Strengthen Your Treasury and Accounting Partnership With Trovata
Effective collaboration between treasury and accounting isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. By centralizing real-time financial data, aligning transaction tagging, and using powerful search and consolidation tools, your teams can work seamlessly together, ensuring that cash flows, payments, and liquidity are managed efficiently.
Trovata enables your teams to overcome the limitations of traditional methods, giving both treasury and accounting a single source of truth and the tools they need to make faster, more informed decisions.
That means less time spent on manual processes and more time focusing on strategic initiatives that drive organizational growth and financial stability. With Trovata, treasury and accounting teams can become true partners, working together to optimize liquidity, manage risk, and contribute to the long-term success of the organization.
Want the right tools to help your treasury and accounting teams to collaborate better? Book a demo today.
