Building banking relationships that fit your corporate structure and requirements is one of the key expectations of the treasury team. Managing these banking relationships have several benefits that keep your operations moving smoothly. Bank Account Management and Fee Analysis are two key areas where the treasury team can begin gauging value from their current banking partners. The question becomes how to quantify and make sense of the data in the most efficient and economical methods possible. For some organizations using Excel to manage these tasks could be working, but as their business grows so will the data collection process across their different business units, making excel less than an ideal situation.
Manual data collection is time consuming, making the treasury operations less strategic. The foundation to automating data collection starts at the bank account level; this is where all the actions happens. Bank accounts are tied to different legal entities or countries for corporations or to different departments for governmental entities. Managing signers can become difficult and without a purpose-built system; maintaining audit trails and approval processes are nearly impossible. If using a legacy system, your provider will start to sunset support, making it costlier to maintain. Over the past few years, software has evolved to become more work flow oriented, opening the doors for organizations to undergo strategic transformations in how they operate.
Once the bank account data is collected automatically, the treasury team can track the fees that are being charged for various activities. Fee statements arrive nicely packed in an EDI822 format, but the product codes rarely ever match up. Tackling this issue in excel is downright overwhelming and very time consuming. Tying service codes together from various financial institutions is tedious without a common Identifier. One common identifier that works to compare apples-to-apples are the AFP Service codes. A best of breed system will give the end user the ability to pinpoint the discrepancies in the products that the results.
A treasury system can really aid in helping manage your bank relationships. If you are unsure about where to start with implementing a treasury system, our recommendation is to build a strong foundation in account management and fee analysis to grant your treasury team with an analytical edge. A treasury team with an enhanced analytical dimension is now an empowered strategic partner to the other business units they support. Automating basic finance processes is the way of the future, leaders in their fields strive to optimize all aspects of their operations.
Learn more about Bank Fee Analysis and Bank Account Management.
April 3, 2019
