Business expansion signals opportunity: new markets, more revenue, and increased influence across the organization. For treasury professionals, it’s a chance to elevate your role from transactional to strategic and become a key partner in guiding the company through complexity.
But with growth comes pressure. Whether it’s launching new entities, entering international markets, or scaling through acquisitions, expansion creates an immediate need for smarter treasury infrastructure. More bank accounts. More currencies. More stakeholders depending on real-time cash insights.
Keeping pace with this growth isn’t about adding headcount or working longer hours. It’s about building efficient systems that scale—giving you visibility, control, and confidence as the business grows around you.
In this article, we’ll break down the core challenges treasurers face during business expansion—and how modern platforms like Trovata help you stay in control as things scale.
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Business Expansion Challenges for Treasury
Expansion creates specific challenges for various different parts of a business. For treasury, many of the hurdles they face revolve around the scaling data requirements. More accounts, more complexity, and more information that needs to be gathered, collated and categorized.
Specifically, treasury teams need to deal with challenges such as:
More Bank Accounts Across More Jurisdictions
Every expansion brings new banking relationships. Without centralized visibility, treasurers are forced to rely on manual logins, inconsistent data formats, and delayed reporting, making it harder to understand the company’s true cash position.
Depending on the method of expansion (acquisition vs. organic growth, for example), the number of accounts can jump practically overnight. At the same time, data quality and analysis accuracy needs to be seamless in the face of this growth.
Multiple Entities with Unique Cash Needs
Subsidiaries often operate with their own payment cycles, payroll timing, and funding requirements. Expansion often comes with an increase in the number of operating entities. This could be overseas subsidiaries, joint ventures, acquired businesses or specific entities for new product lines or service offerings.
Treasury must balance autonomy with oversight, ensuring liquidity across the group without overfunding individual accounts.
Foreign Currencies and Shifting FX Exposures
Expanding operations globally introduces currency risk. Treasurers must track exposures in real time, forecast across FX pairs, and determine when and how to hedge, especially when forecasts are changing month to month.
Disconnected Systems and Patchwork Reporting
Expansion often outpaces system integration. When ERP, TMS, and bank data don’t talk to each other, teams are left stitching together reports manually, wasting time and increasing the risk of errors.
Consolidating these systems can sometimes take years (if it even happens at all), and in the meantime treasurers need to be able to consolidate data from these numerous platforms to provide a clear, accurate picture to senior management.
Increased Regulatory and Compliance Pressure
With every new jurisdiction comes a new set of banking, tax, and compliance obligations. Treasurers must stay on top of local regulations while ensuring group-level governance and audit-readiness.
Without automation and a centralized view of cash, it becomes nearly impossible to stay on top of daily liquidity, cash positioning, and forecasting, especially across geographies.
Why Treasury Needs To Scale Before the Business Does
Treasury systems and processes are often built for a moment in time. In many cases this is when a company is smaller, simpler, and operating domestically. But once expansion kicks in, manual processes break down quickly.
What used to be a straightforward cash position report now requires pulling data from a dozen banks, normalizing file formats, and tracking intra-entity transfers, all before noon. And trying to play catch up after the business is already expanding can be a recipe for disaster.
Gaps in your data can be a significant risk to the business, not to mention a major hindrance on strategic decision making.
To keep up, treasury needs:
- Bank-agnostic aggregation for instant visibility across all accounts
- Automated categorization to tag and track inflows/outflows by region, entity, or type
- Dynamic forecasting tools that adjust to real-time data and new growth assumptions
- Audit-ready reporting that scales with entity complexity
Building a finance and cash management structure that supports all these features allows treasurers to easily and quickly scale their work with business operations.
A Real-World Example: Speedcast’s Treasury Transformation
One treasury team that faced the scaling challenge head-on was Speedcast, a global telecommunications provider that had just completed a string of acquisitions. With over 250 bank accounts across 40+ countries, their lean treasury team was overwhelmed by manual processes and fragmented cash reporting.
“We had up to 80% of our team’s time just going into spreadsheets—pulling data, reconciling it, trying to tell an accurate story. It was exhausting.” – Kimber Davis, Senior Treasury Manager, Speedcast
To keep up with the business, Speedcast had over 20 GL accountants across regions contributing to daily cash reporting—just to meet baseline visibility needs. Despite all that effort, reports were still delayed, siloed, and prone to error.
As the company grew, treasury complexity outpaced their systems. Analysts were spending hours compiling data manually, delaying decisions and making it harder to respond to change. Kimber and her VP of Treasury knew it was time for transformation—and chose Trovata to automate data aggregation, centralize visibility, and eliminate redundant workflows.
The result? Daily cash reporting time dropped by over 75%, and the team reclaimed capacity for more strategic work like FX planning, working capital optimization, and supporting expansion initiatives.
“We’re not just looking at funding bank accounts and pushing money around. Treasury can now be involved in FX hedging, DSO, DPO, and many strategic aspects of the company that go far beyond just monitoring balances.” – Kimber Davis, Senior Treasury Manager, Speedcast
Speedcast’s story is a clear example of how investing in treasury efficiency can immediately reduce overhead—and equip treasury leaders to scale with the business.
Learn more about how Speedcast transformed treasury to keep up with rapid growth:
A Playbook for Scaling Treasury With the Business
So, it all makes sense, you know you need a scalable treasury function to keep up with business expansion, but how do you actually go about doing it? Here’s where to focus:
1. Centralize Cash Visibility with Real-Time Bank Connectivity
The first step in scaling treasury operations is getting a clear view of your cash. All of it, everywhere, at any time. To do that, you need software that connects all of your accounts to provide a single source of truth for your cash data.
Legacy file formats can leave a lot to be desired, taking a long time to set up, only to provide data that is slow to update and still requires manual input to normalize and organize. However, modern API-powered bank connections can allow treasury teams to pull real-time balances and transactions into one centralized platform.
This eliminates the need to log in to dozens of portals or wait for manual file uploads, saving hours each week and reducing the risk of errors in reporting. Most importantly, new API connections can be set up in no time at all, meaning that whenever there’s a new bank account or entity that you need to monitor, you can have cash data flowing in by the end of the day. That’s the definition of scalable.
2. Tag Transactions by Region, Entity, and Purpose
Once all your data is being gathered without daily manual workflows, the next important step is how to organize it all. As operations expand, so does the complexity of cash movement.
That’s where the deceptively powerful process of transaction tagging comes to the fore.
Establishing automated tagging rules allows treasurers to categorize every transaction by entity, region, currency, or cash flow type. These tags create a shared framework for analysis and forecasting, making it easier to build accurate reports and drill into specific segments when needed.
This system is also designed with scalability at the foundation. With your tagging schema in place, new entities and accounts can fit seamlessly into it. If new business units or segments mean the need for new tag categories, you simply add them to your existing ones.
It’s a flexible, powerful system that organizes your data and grows with the business.
Recommended: Tag, Track, Triumph: Treasurers Share How to Master Your Bank Data
3. Build Modular Forecasts that Roll up to a Global View
With a foundation of detailed, accurate data that flexes with the company, you can move on to forecasting that information to better inform strategic decisions. Importantly, forecasts should reflect how your business actually operates, not just wishful thinking.
You can create separate forecast modules for each entity, region, or department, then roll them up into consolidated views that align with how senior leadership and the board think about performance. This modular approach ensures that each area is planned accurately, while still giving treasury the global oversight it needs.
And again, it allows you to plug new data from business expansion seamlessly into your existing forecasts.
4. Collaborate Cross-Functionally with Shared Data
Lastly, with business growth comes an increased need for focused, process-driven collaboration. It’s easy to collaborate if you’re a startup with a few employees, but for larger and growing businesses, you can’t rely on ad-hoc chats around the coffee machine to keep everyone informed.
Because treasury doesn’t (or at least, shouldn’t) operate in isolation. You need to partner closely with FP&A, accounting, operations, and regional finance teams to understand upcoming activity, align assumptions, and close data gaps.
All of this is made far simpler, faster, and easier with a shared source of financial truth. When there’s consistency and collaboration on the data, it makes it easier to build trust and ensure everyone is working from the same numbers.
Don’t Let Growth Outpace Treasury
Business expansion doesn’t have to mean treasury chaos. With the right setup, treasurers can provide even more value, from advising on capital allocation to optimizing global liquidity and staying ahead of risks.
Trovata gives treasurers the tools to scale confidently with the business, without growing headcount or spending hours wrestling with spreadsheets.
Want to see how Trovata can help you manage multi-entity, multi-currency cash forecasting as you grow? Book a demo today.
