If you flip back the calendar four decades to the 1980s, you would be amazed at the technology that treasurers once regarded as brilliant state-of-the-art inventions. Remember IBM’s bulky desktop PC? A prized treasury management tool of that era was a floppy disk.
Back then, it was considered a revolutionary product that treasurers used to store a company’s financial data. Today, those disks are in museums or time capsules and have become a fading memory. Thankfully, the prehistoric days of manual data transfer are history.
Now, the rapid evolution of technology is creating a new playing field, empowering you to digitize your treasury and eliminate tedious, manual processes.
Knowing which treasury management tools will help elevate your business is critical to ensure your organization has a competitive edge with a real-time view of your cash flow and position and an automated suite of comprehensive cash reporting and forecasting functionality.
Treasury Management Tools Overview
Legacy Treasury Management Systems
Treaury Management Systems (TMS) are still the most commonly utilized treasury management tools since the 1980s. While TMS reduced the sprawl of managing cash and transaction data in disparate systems, they often require manual intervention as automatic reconciliation rates are quite low. You suddenly have to spend hours cleansing your bank statements, writing scripts to normalize columns, and converting currencies to get an accurate picture of your cash position.
Legacy TMS limits your treasury’s growth potential because:
- Discovering new opportunities and insights into your cash flow is too time-consuming as custom reporting and forecasting require heavy lifts from IT to produce and implement
- Consolidating and normalizing your bank data still requires you to manually download bank statements and upload them to your TMS, leading to making decisions based on outdated data
- Implementation requires up to 6+ months of training across multiple departments, leading to narrow-use of the system throughout your entire organization
Your treasury management system shouldn’t be a bottleneck to your treasury’s effectiveness. If your system is hampering your innovation, reducing accessibility to accurate cash insights, and limiting your treasury’s growth potential, it’s time to evaluate your treasury tech stack.
Automated Cash Management Platforms
Incredible technological advances within the treasury space have occurred due to the rise of direct APIs in commercial banking and cloud transformation. These advancements empowered the digital transformation movement within the treasury space, giving birth to automated cash management platforms.
These automated cash management platforms are built on modern data architecture and Direct-To-Bank APIs, empowering their users to automate their cash workflows like cash reporting, analysis, and forecasting and gain real-time cash visibility into their organization.
How to Pick the Right Technology for Your Treasury
Any cash management platform that doesn’t change with the times will eventually outlive its purpose. With the ascent of AI and automation, rich data sources are now at your fingers. This presents a new challenge: which tool is the best for your business?
Your cash management platform should:
- Establish a single source of truth for real-time cash and transaction data
- Quickly create and iterate upon custom cash reports and forecasts that allow deep drill-downs into transaction data
- Feature Natural Language Search, AutoTag™ and Search+Tag™ so that you can find historical data with just a few words
Establish a Single Source of Truth for Real-Time Cash and Transaction Data
While legacy TMS claims to help you manage the entirety of your treasury, they are unable to establish a single source of real-time data across all of your bank accounts. Due to the manual maintenance required to consolidate and normalize banking information, legacy TMS still requires you to download statements from your multiple bank accounts, manually normalize this data into a common format, and feed it into the system.
Automated cash management platforms are built on Modern Direct-To-Bank APIs that empower you with up-to-the-hour transactions and cash balance details from your many bank accounts. Manual intervention isn’t required to collate your cash and transaction data in one secure platform, meaning you are making decisions on the most accurate, up-to-date cash data.
Quickly Create and Iterate Upon Custom Cash Reports and Forecasts
TMS legacy architecture hinders data exploration due to the inflexible nature of its reporting and forecasting tools. Any custom reporting requires significant IT overhead, likely takes weeks, and in the end leverages old data.
Automated cash management platforms’ reporting is dynamic and fluid, empowering you to generate automated, custom reports and forecasts based on certain institutions, vendors, tags, and more. Any generated report is interactive, allowing you to click into any element of a report and view the transactions the report is built upon. Having deep drill-down capabilities at your fingertips enables you to understand the story behind any report and discover new growth opportunities.
Drill Down Into Historical Data with Just a Few Words
Finding specific transactions in legacy TMS is only possible by infinitely scrolling through your data. Through artificial intelligence and machine learning, automated cash management platforms can analyze transaction data in milliseconds, empowering new features like Natural Language Search and Search+Tag™.
Natural language search finds the specific data you want across all bank accounts and transactions with just a few words. These searches can then be saved for future cash reporting, analysis, and forecasting utilizing Search+Tag™ technology.
Tags transform cash reporting and forecasting into an incredibly delightful experience due to how easy it is to discover in-depth cash insights in an instant. This intuitive and deep analysis and processing is impossible within TMS due to their siloed legacy, dated data architecture.
Implement Quickly
Legacy TMS are known to have long, complex, and labor-intensive implementation processes that can last 4-9 months. Many businesses have to pay for an expensive implementation package led by a project manager when implementing these systems.
Trovata, the automated cash management platform, requires no internal IT lift. Treasurers can go from 0-to-60 on day one due to how Trovata’s Direct-To-Bank API connections to major banks, connecting your accounts is easy. Our UI is extremely intuitive and simple to use, enabling you to skip the onboarding and begin exploring our platform.
Conclusion
Treasury management shouldn’t have to be a manual, tedious process. With Trovata, our automated cash management platform, you can feel empowered to make accurate, data-led decisions in order to better monitor, analyze and automate your cash reporting, forecasting, and analysis.
Download our Cash Management Playbook to discover how our comprehensive suite of automated, real-time cash reporting and analysis tools can enable you and your team to focus on strategic initiatives that drive value for your business.
