Navigating corporate treasury management can be incredibly challenging and time-consuming when your cash and transaction data is managed in disparate spreadsheets and systems. You shouldn’t have to struggle for hours-on-end with your treasury management system to access the cash insights you need to make informed, strategic decisions. By avoiding the traditional pitfalls that arise with legacy TMS, you can empower your team to focus on strategic objectives that move your business forward.
What Is the Role of the Corporate Treasurer?
Being successful as a corporate treasurer involves managing your organization’s cash position and building the relationships necessary to achieve your organizations’ strategic objectives.
To accomplish critical strategic objectives, you must:
- Ensure credit lines are efficient and available
- Manage liquidity to fund new development
- Prepare cash flow forecasts to inform your executive team
These goals are time-consuming if you must manually wrangle bank data to gain the cash visibility needed to be successful.
There are software solutions designed to assist you in accomplishing these tasks. Still, most software available is built on legacy, inflexible data architecture that requires large manual efforts to gain access to in-depth cash insights. This leads to a host of technology-related challenges that ensures treasurers spend large amounts of time finding workarounds in Excel to accomplish their core responsibilities.
Legacy Corporate Treasury Management Systems: Avoiding Pitfalls
Many treasury management systems are built on legacy database structures that limit the bank data received within .csv spreadsheets. As strategic needs and markets become more complex, real-time consolidation and normalization of bank transaction data becomes more mission-critical. If a company drifts too far from its TMS’s rigid categories, it can even present a risk management problem.
Here are four anchors that legacy treasury management systems will place on your company:
- Excel Sheet Drudgery: Since legacy TMS systems are not flexible or customizable, they can’t easily generate new report types without a heavy lift from IT teams. You must manually pull raw transaction data from the bank and process it in Excel to perform meaningful cash analysis, which can take days to accomplish. This reduces your ability to contribute time to strategic analysis and find opportunities to optimize working capital and free up cash.
- Outdated Cash Forecasting: Your business is moving faster than it was in the late 90s due to the digitization of our modern world. Your entire business category might not even have been around in the late 90s. Before the internet, it was okay to estimate your cash position based on monthly bank data consolidations. With our world becoming ever-more global, managing treasury operations becomes ever more complex. Legacy TMS’s forecasting capabilities are rigid and inflexible, so by the time you manually build your forecast, you are making predictions with outdated and inaccurate information.
- Manual Data Aggregation: TMS’s outdated architecture is not equipped to handle specialized reporting. Suddenly, you find yourself back in Excel, spending an all-nighter manually consolidating and normalizing yesterday’s bank data to build rigid forecasts. And whenever your CFO asks for an updated version a few weeks later, you are back repeating the same process. Your corporate treasury toolset should scale with your growing business instead of holding you back with manual workflows.
- Slow Financial Reporting: When you’re doing all of that manual work to get around the inflexible data structures of a legacy treasury management system, you’re not able to get reports out quickly. And just like that, you potentially lose your chance to act on a strategic investment opportunity. That all can change with access to real-time cash position data, so you can make faster, data-driven decisions on the fly.
How Do You Manage Corporate Treasury Functions?
Trovata, our open banking platform, is an excellent solution for overcoming the many pitfalls legacy TMS struggle with. What separates Trovata above other treasury management solutions is our modern data architecture and the use of industry-first open banking APIs.
Trovata automates the consolidation and normalization of your cash and bank data in one secure platform. With the utilization of AutoTag™ features, Trovata automatically categorizes and segments your transaction, empowering you to drill down into historical data with ease. Do you want to conduct variance analysis or create a scenario plan? With Trovata Platform, you can quickly develop or adjust reports and forecasts on the fly.
Better manage your corporate treasury functions by investing in your time: the time you spend generating insights, finding the gaps in payments and funding, thinking about finance, and moving cash responsively through capital markets.
Through automating your cash workflows, Trovata empowers you with more time to perform these critical strategic tasks instead of getting stuck in spreadsheet management. By accomplishing this, you can ensure you continue to successfully navigate corporate treasury management.
Gain access to a digital transformation blueprint to help you plan your digital transformation journey: Download our Treasurer’s Guide to a Data-Driven Future.
