When the volume of group companies, banking entities or account movements acquires a significant volume, doubts begin to arise if it is not possible to automate certain accounting processes related to banks, customers or suppliers.
If we add to this the fact that obtaining visibility of my cash in the short and medium term to make financing decisions implies a great effort and uncertainty due to the different data sources and variables, added to the manual treatment of the data, these are clear signs that I need a specialized treasury tool.
In the market there are different TMS (Treasury Management System) that can help the financial department in the day to day, but like any other software I must analyze which one is the best suited to my needs. To do so, we highlight 3 fundamental elements for making the decision:
Integration with banks and ERP
The main data sources of a TMS are the banks and the ERP with which the company works.
For communication with banks there are basically two possibilities, either we opt for EDItran or for the increasingly widespread banking APIs that have been introduced as of the PSD2 regulation. EDItran is a product that has been on the market for many years and allows bidirectional communication both for receiving the Cuaderno 43 with the bank statement and balances, and for sending the different transfer files (standard 34), direct debits (Standard 19), Confirming, etc… It is a very stable product with great results if what we need is to have the information of the previous day’s closing as the maximum level of detail. As for the APIs, they are becoming increasingly important due to the speed with which they can be connected and additionally they offer us the information practically in real time, but with the disadvantage that it is not yet available for 100% of the banks. The decision between EDItran or APIs depends on the number of entities or with which you are working.
As for integration with the ERP, we must be certain not only that it is fully integrated, but also that it has a significant number of clients to ensure that it will cover all my needs in a practically standard way. That a TMS works correctly is directly proportional to the integration with the ERP being as reliable as possible. The cost of integration implies an optimization process that will greatly lengthen implementation and payback times, a fundamental factor in the decision to implement a TMS.
Usability and Maintenance
Usability is something difficult to measure, and in most cases, since no proofs of concept are performed, it is something that is solved once the decision has been made. A tool focused on saving time and facilitating access to data must be intuitive, and in an agile way it must allow me to work comfortably on a daily basis. The vast majority of tools on the market have a costly parameterization, and above all a very high maintenance to achieve high rates of high automation. When we are looking for agility and automation we must review or even do some proof of concept to understand the process and how much the product will help me according to my specific problem. It is very important that the standard of an application covers a very high percentage of the project, but the tool must be flexible enough to adapt to my real problems.
Financial Reporting
Nowadays any software must incorporate a superior Business intelligence layer. In particular treasury management and the amount of products and positions that come into play make it essential to have a dashboard that allows me to analyze the information for decision making.
In particular, it is not only the bank balances and my forecasts of future collections/payments based on the expected date that come into play, but I must also take into account currency exchange rates, interest rates, the situation of all my short and long-term financing lines, and a long etcetera that I will find it difficult to analyze without a powerful BI tool.
If what we want is to eliminate an endless number of Excel sheets, a good dashboard from which you can segment and analyze the data already processed, containing alerts for different situations, analysis at any moment in time, deviation analysis, graphs that visually facilitate the visualization of future situations, we need the TMS to have a dashboard that analyzes everything in depth.
Once decided, we are ready to start the implementation, and starting from a scope definition with clear objectives, a TMS implementation should take around 3 months to go into production.
