Cash has always been king.
In previous decades, treasury professionals managed cash flow forecasting and reporting with spreadsheets. Thankfully, we’re moving past that.
Modern treasury technology innovation has advanced significantly and is driving changes in how we manage our cash flows. But your treasury software options are many and multiplying.
According to Market Research Future, the global cash flow solutions market will grow 25% by 2030 and reach a market valuation of $2.1 billion.
So how do you choose the best treasury technology solution for your company? Here are some considerations to help you make the right selection for your business.
What Is Cash Management Software?
Cash management software is a category of software products that help make finance and treasury teams more effective. They leverage technology to provide a range of solutions, including cash visibility, forecasting, reporting, and payments.
These solutions typically integrate with your ERP system and your banking data. Connecting the two allows treasury teams to quickly see up-to-date—and in some cases real-time—cash flow data.
The most common features of cash management software solutions include:
- Cash data tracking
- Reconciliation
- Liquidity management
- In-house banking
- Analytics
- Reporting
- Security
- Compliance
What Problems Does It Solve?
What can cash management platforms actually do for you? They can help you overcome a range of challenges.
Disconnected Data
Modern business architectures often require multiple bank accounts between several providers, and they may even use different currencies. Cash management tools centralize your bank data from several sources so you can see it all in one place.
That means no one has to log into different online banking platforms, download CSV files, and import them into your spreadsheet tool. And it also means you can quickly view all your data when needed and be sure that it’s up-to-date.
Disorganized Transactions
You need to be able to analyze your data by type of transaction, but that categorization is time-consuming. Cash management systems make it easy to automate categorization using predefined rules. You can quickly identify trends in vendor disbursements, customer receipts, and more.
Lack of Cash Flow Visibility
The traditional way to understand your cash position involves logging into different bank accounts, downloading the data, and uploading it into a spreadsheet. But spreadsheets create a visibility gap because data is almost immediately outdated.
A survey by consulting firm BCG found that “only 50% of bank treasurers have daily insight into the entire banking book.”
Treasury tech replaces complicated spreadsheets with streamlined, user-friendly dashboards that update with real-time data.
You can quickly analyze cash flows, create reports, forecast future periods, identify trends, and ultimately empower your team to make well-informed decisions. You can segment data by region, currency, division, and more.
More advanced solutions even provide artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms to enhance your forecasting and analysis. The result is much more improved visibility into your cash position.
Complicated Payment Processes
In traditional payment management processes, reports and analyses are often disconnected from the payment systems. You must log into your bank account or rely on third-party payment processors.
Now, cash solutions platforms can even connect directly to your bank’s payment system, enabling direct payments to vendors. This lets you capture payment statuses, approvals, beneficiary instructions, and user actions directly in your cash flow data system.
Main Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Software for Your Company
With a long list of available cash management software solutions, it’s critical to understand how to evaluate your potential options and select the most suitable for your business needs. Here’s what you should consider.
Ease of Implementation
Some tools require a significant investment of resources to implement. Things get especially complicated when you need to borrow time from your IT team or developers. For those cases, you aren’t just considering the monetary cost of implementation but also how long it will take to begin to use.
Look for solutions that you can implement quickly and without the need for your IT team to get involved.
Your Current Technology Infrastructure
Any cash management solution you choose should connect with your current tools and fit into your workflows. Ideally, you’ll be able to find a solution that has the native integrations for your current tools. You should also prioritize tools that are intuitive and easy to use so that your teams can learn the new tool quickly.
Financial Institution Partners
A software solution that manages your cash flow data will only be useful if you can connect it to your banking data.
Many banks are creating application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow you to set up a bank feed.
When evaluating new treasury management software, ensure each one can pipe in data from the specific financial institutions you use. If your bank currently doesn’t have an API pipeline that allows you to receive real-time data, consider asking them to build one.
Analytic Functionality
Part of the power of cash management software solutions is that they allow you to look at your cash flow data in new and useful ways. But some solutions have more sophisticated analytics and reporting features than others.
The more advanced solutions even offer AI and machine learning algorithms to help you better draw insights from your data.
Look for solutions that can provide advanced reporting, include automated forecasting models, and offer a choice between forecasting models.
How Trovata Fits in
Trovata is a cash flow management solution that makes treasury, finance, and accounting tasks easy. It provides real-time reports so you can see the liquid cash assets you have on hand and robust forecasts to help your strategic financial decision-making.
We provide turnkey technology for finance, treasury, and accounting teams so they can take advantage of their data and enjoy better visibility.
Some of the features of our solution include the following:
- Automations. Trovata updates your transaction data automatically, saving enormous amounts of time. That gives you more time to take care of your other business-critical responsibilities.
- No code. You can easily implement Trovata without any IT resources. That means your team will quickly get to see its value.
- Up-to-date data. Because you don’t update your data manually, you reduce human errors and always get 100% visibility into your current cash flow.
- Insights and alerts. Trovata specializes in making your financial data easy to consume so you can turn your insights into informed action. Plus, alerts notify you about necessary approvals, account balance charges, and more.
Trovata is powerful. It empowers you to analyze, report, and forecast your cash flows so you can identify opportunities and make the best-informed business decisions. We save you time and ensure your data is accurate so you can make smarter decisions. And there’s no IT required to set it up.
Cash is still king. Trovata puts the king to work for you.
Book a demo today to explore our next-gen cash management solution.
