How Lurie Children's Hospital runs treasury with one bank and a two-person team

When the hospital restructured its finance organization, the standalone two-person treasury department was dissolved and its responsibilities moved into accounting. Nicola Byrne, Vice President and Controller, took ownership of the function. Monica Funk, then the hospital's tax manager, added day-to-day treasury to her role and is now Manager, Tax and Treasury. Together they handle daily cash for a major hospital system alongside their existing tax and accounting work, while a separate colleague manages investments.

What makes their setup notable is what they don't have: a dedicated treasury staff or a stack of banking relationships. Lurie Children's runs its operating cash through a single bank, J.P. Morgan. And they still open Trovata every morning.

The single-bank question

Multibank cash aggregation is the most common reason treasury teams adopt Trovata. Lurie Children's makes the case for the other side, showing what the platform does when there is only one bank to connect.

"We are really one bank. We're not using multiple banks," said Nicola Byrne, Vice President and Controller.

The J.P. Morgan portal gives the team bank statements and standard reporting. Workday, the hospital's ERP, maps transactions to support journal entry posting. Neither categorizes cash movement the way the Treasury team needs to for forecasting.

"J.P. Morgan doesn't have the cash forecasting ability, which was mainly what we were looking for," said Monica Funk, Manager, Tax and Treasury. "It's just a totally different system."

Tags that do the categorizing

Monica built out Trovata's transaction tags to cover the hospital's major cash categories, including government grants, receipts, vendor payments, bond payments, payroll, and taxes. Once a tag is set, every matching transaction is categorized automatically.

Automatic categorization also closed a gap that manual spreadsheets leave open.

That tag work shows up as confidence at the controller level.

"When Monica took it over, it really wasn't balanced. She's expanded the tags," said Nicola. "We definitely have more comfort now around inflows and outflows."

A daily cash report the controller trusts

Each morning, Monica logs into Trovata, ties the totals for the hospital's main accounts to the bank statements, and adjusts tags where needed. She then pulls the daily and monthly forecast views, downloads the inflow, outflow, and closing cash balance reports, and sends a consolidated report to Nicola and other leaders.

Trovata often shows her transactions before the bank does.

When a question comes in, such as whether a specific vendor payment cleared or a receipt landed, she answers it in Trovata rather than the bank portal.

From inherited spreadsheet to live forecast

The team inherited an annual cash forecast built in Excel by the previous treasury staff, with no one left to explain how it worked. Monica reverse-engineered the model, matched Trovata's data streams to the forecast’s cash flow categories, and broke them down further in the platform. A forecast that once lived in a static spreadsheet now runs alongside live bank data, and the team plans to keep extending it, building in drivers like patient volume so the forecast responds as conditions change.

Advice for single-bank treasuries

For a two-person function balancing treasury with tax and controllership duties, the tool has to carry its own weight. Monica says it does.

"I feel like it's pretty easy to figure out once we had the initial working sessions," said Monica. "It's a good tool."

Asked whether she would recommend Trovata, Nicola gave the same answer. For treasury teams that bank with a single institution and wonder what a cash platform adds, the Lurie Children's answer comes down to forecasting cash in a way the JPM portal doesn’t support, the transaction categorization no one has to do by hand, and a daily cash position the controller trusts.