More and more people are embracing flexible, remote work conditions and want more of it.
According to a recent survey, 58% of Americans have an opportunity to work from home one day a week, while 35% work remotely five days a week.
From a cash management perspective, the remote work movement creates a challenge: How do you ensure everyone works with the most up-to-date financial data?
Why Is Digital Transformation of Cash Management Necessary?
For many businesses, cash flow reporting and forecasting are still done by hand in spreadsheets, leading to financial professionals spending hours scouring bank portals and aggregating their data into spreadsheets. One of the inherent challenges with spreadsheets is version control.
Spreadsheets were never meant to analyze huge data sets shared throughout the workspace. Using spreadsheets as a single source of truth can result in team members working with error-laden, outdated data.
As a result, data cleansing steals much of the time from analysis.
That is what digital transformation seeks to change for finance teams: Provide organizations with access to aggregated bank data when and wherever it’s needed so you can make more informed, data-backed decisions.
Digital transformation is not just a buzzword; it’s becoming necessary for companies that want to scale in the future. As a CFO, it’s time to lead the safeguarding and optimization of cash to support future growth.
Your Role as CFO Within Digitizing Cash Management
You must lead your finance and treasury teams by example. If you don’t communicate and drive the value of automation throughout your organization, you can’t expect your employees to emphasize it.
By being a cheerleader for digital transformation, you can increase buy-in throughout your organization and improve your cash and data management processes.
New technologies, such as APIs, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence are equipping financial teams to discover new insights that no human could ever imagine discovering – in half the time.
You can equip your team to:
- Automate your forecast baseline
- Generate multiple scenarios with flexible user-defined variables
- Efficiently perform variance analysis to increase forecast accuracy
- Segment transactions into relevant tags automatically based on patterns within your data
- Perform Google-like search and be provided a list of transactions across key vendors, institutions, clients, and transaction types within milliseconds
- Initiate and send payments across supported bank partners in one, secure platform without unnecessary transaction fees from third-parties
How To Increase Buy-In For Digital Transformation Team
Change can be scary, so showing the value of digitally transforming your business’s cash management processes is critical. You craft a data-led culture by demonstrating how digital transformation simplifies day-to-day tasks.
The ultimate goal of digitally transforming cash management is to help your team gain more time to do strategic work that accomplishes company goals instead of tedious manual data management. Many of our clients, like Eventbrite, save 48+ hours monthly by automating the aggregation and normalization of their bank data.
Digitizing Cash Management: Top 3 Benefits
1. Establish A Single Source of Truth
Want to see all your cash from all your banks in one place? Open banking APIs have you covered.
APIs are revolutionizing how finance teams consolidate bank and transaction data. They connect directly to your bank accounts and automate the aggregation and normalization of your data into one platform.
And paired with a cloud-based platform, like Trovata, they can empower your team with nimble access to up-to-date balance and transaction data no matter their location.
Say goodbye to manual data cleansing!
2. Streamline Bank Data Reconciliation
Are you still downloading files manually to reconcile? If so, automated cash management technology also helps automate the month-end close process.
Searching for specific data has never been easier with an established single source of truth for all cash data.
You can perform custom, Google-like searches, powered by machine learning algorithms, and get results in milliseconds. This technology amplifies your ability to track cash movement.
3. Increase Reporting and Forecasting Efficiency
Your financial team shouldn’t have to create cash reports and forecasts manually; instead, enable them to focus their attention on strategic analysis that propels the business forward.
Automated cash management platforms enable you to segment transactions easily via tags. These tags can be utilized to generate future reports or forecasts, freeing your team up from having to build every report manually.
Many of these platforms, like Trovata, enable tailoring any report with filters, allowing for the inclusion or exclusion of specific data based on tags, currencies, institutions, or accounts.
Based on the settings and data you select, Trovata automatically generates the custom report or forecast. Any report elements can be drilled into, enhancing your view of the transactions compiling the report.
Begin Your Digital Transformation Journey Today
You do not have to trek this digital transformation journey alone. Trovata empowers everyone to analyze, report, forecast, move– manage cash like a pro– no matter who your business banks with. Easily access your multibank data in a single platform and gain powerful cash flow insights that facilitate smarter business decisions.
Download our resource, A Strategic CFO’s Guide To Digital Transformation, to discover how you can implement a digitized cash management strategy in less than 6 weeks.
