Automation is a key component of a Treasury Data Strategy. However, like every good business change it needs a “why?” One of the biggest hurdles is that there is usually an investment (even in internal staff time) to set up an automation and it is difficult to make a case based purely on direct cost savings alone.

Digital treasurers recognise that ultimately the savings come from the wider impacts of manual process, including robustness and consistency.

But it only takes two minutes…

One of the first hurdles in an automation project is a resistance to investing time in something that “only takes two minutes to do“. However, a manual process, no matter how brief, will:

• Be largely dependent on one or two individuals in the team
• Have inconsistencies in both timing and accuracy of execution
• Doubtless subject to Excel data handling issues
• Prevent downstream processes being automated

The goal should be take any mechanical step and move it into an automated system, so that it can be completed before 8am every morning. That way, the treasury team can concentrate on adding value – doing something constructive with the data, making decisions and managing risk.

Consistency and confidence

The greatest gain from automation is the consistency of delivery. Colleagues in the wider business expect a treasury function to “just work” and to get the numbers right first time.

Automation helps deliver this dream by taking the human out of the mechanical processes and thereby reducing the risk of error. Fewer opportunities for error means less checking and rework and crucially less risk of embarrassment in front of the CFO. This is where the great saving of automation really kicks in.

Have you updated the cash report?

A fully digital treasury function will have an automated solution for key data points. For example, this might mean a cash report that contains all the data and granularity that the team needs – so

When it comes to updates, again automated solutions make it clear when a report was last updated. In the event of a query, it is easy to confirm that the report has been fully updated. This is quite the contrast with manual Excel based solution, which typically depends on an analyst manually copy-pasting data from multiple sources, with the inherent risk of mistaken or missing updates – but crucially, also no record of if/when the data has been updated.

Finally, a digital treasury function will only have one automated cash data set – this greatly reduces the risk of mistakes because everyone is looking at the same data.

Having a definitive single source means the data needs to be multi-dimensional so that it can answer any question you might need to know, including breakdowns by:

• Currency
• Country
• Bank
• Liquidity solution
• Restrictions, both practical and legal
• Legal entity

How can I do this in practice?

Taking the example of the cash report, there are several approaches to building an automated solution.

• Firstly, consider whether your TMS has a suitable reporting solution. In many cases, the TMS might have 97% of the data, but merging that with data from other sources is not within the scope of most TMS reporting modules.
• Next, look at the wider business data platforms in your organisation. If there’s an existing finance data warehouse or data lake, it may be possible to leverage that.
  • This would mean that key dimension likes org structures and legal entities are likely already available and there’s limited investment required in the new platform.
  • Issues can arise around granularity and volume of data, as well as timeliness of updates. For example, most finance data warehouses are built around accounting period timescales — whereas treasury teams work on a daily granularity.
• If the above options don’t deliver what you need, then you can always use PowerBI to build your own solution.