Four facts mid-market CFOs need to know about cash management applications

Centralized cash management helps mid-markets to maximize returns on invested capital and also prevent the risks that can affect the company. The key benefits of centralized cash management software are as follows:

• Continuous global cash visibility
• Automate repetitive tasks
• Proactive decision making

Investing in cash management automation software eliminates manual workflows and gives mid-market treasurers detailed visibility into their cash flow position. Many treasurers continue to rely on spreadsheets, downloading statements and manually importing recent transactions into the spreadsheets and ERP. Centralized cash management software seamlessly connects with all banks, ERPs, and independent market data sources to process files in all formats, including BAI2, MT940, ISO20022, XLS, and CSV, by:

• Faster consolidation: Automated bank data capture using an automated platform with independent market data from external sources, with the option for the user to override or manually upload additional data as desired.
• Bank transaction aggregation and consolidation: Aggregates and consolidates bank transactions into customizable templates for all teams.
• Reduces manual work: Transactions are automatically classified based on bank, account, region, and category, which improves efficiency, visibility, and control.

Advanced reporting enables everyone in the organization to gain more insights from business data in less time and with less effort. Companies can create reports that combine data from various sources, customize them to meet the needs of different users, and automate the reporting process.

Importance of advanced reporting

To stay competitive and improve business performance, it is critical to gain insights from data. But every organization is different, and each business can benefit from viewing data in ways that reflect how its operations work and how it measures success. Furthermore, different groups and individuals in the organization have different information needs. Without advanced reporting tools, creating customized or individualized views of business data may necessitate a lot of time-consuming, manual work. Businesses frequently must export data from multiple applications, compile the data into spreadsheets, perform specialized calculations manually, and then move the results into yet another tool for presentation. Treasury managers may have to wait days or even weeks for critical reports, which means the information contained in those reports is always out of date.

Benefits of automated advanced reporting

Automated advanced reporting has the potential to benefit the entire organization. It can both enhance decision-making and improve productivity.

• More informed decisions: Automated advanced reporting promotes informed decision-making throughout the organization by providing all users with the information they require in an easy-to-understand format.
• Timely data: Reports can be generated on demand and populated with real-time data, allowing users to make decisions based on the most up-to-date information.
• Increased efficiency: Advanced reporting tools can significantly reduce the amount of time and manual effort required to create customized reports.

Real-time cash visibility, automated bank statement processing, and automated reconciliation are all features of cash management applications. Automated bank statement processing and prior-day reconciliation saves time, eliminates errors, and frees up cash managers to focus on more important higher-value tasks. Treasury spends a significant amount of time gathering data and compiling reports. This is why treasury professionals seek to upgrade to cash management automation, which can reduce the time required for data aggregation. Other features of a cash management application for mid-markets include:

• Continuous global cash visibility: A single dashboard view of all the cash across all banks, regions, companies, and currencies improves cash utilization.
• Error-free reconciliation: Automated reconciliation based on user-defined and standard tagging rules ensures there are no chances of error.
• Less time spent on repetitive functions: By ensuring receipt and reconciliation of every bank file, time and effort spent on manually reconciling statement items are saved.
• Easy tracking of cash flows: Automatically capture intercompany activities, track balances, and record interest across all mirrored and notional bank accounts.
• Proactive decision making: Automated global cash visibility supplies users with vital information and enough time to make better investment and funding decisions.

Cash management applications can significantly eliminate CFOs challenges of reconciliation and integration of highly manual, decentralized data with no visibility from banks and FP&A by:

• Continuous global cash visibility
• Automate repetitive tasks
• Auto-reconciliation of previous day cash transactions
• Automated daily cash positioning
• Easy and accurate bank connectivity and data repository