This Articles is a repost from an Article posted by our Content Partner Nomentia
We recently interviewed treasury expert Patrick Kunz, who’s been working in treasury all his life. As he mentioned himself during the webinar, “Treasury is basically all I know.”
Patrick has worked independently for the past 11 years. He founded his own company, Pecunia Treasury and Finance, and works with various companies, from scale-ups to large enterprises and anything in-between.
Patrick provided interesting insights into what treasurers should prioritize during the first 180 days of a new job because of his longstanding experience and the many temporary assignments he’s had.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the main things we also covered during a recent webinar. These are the main topics that Patrick deems crucial during the first 180 days of starting a new job in Treasury:
Let’s dive deeper into each one of these topics.
How planning and prioritizing are done in your first 180 days is highly dependent on each company. Suppose it’s a longstanding company with hardly any volatility. In that case, your priorities are different compared to an organization without a treasury department, where it has to be built from scratch, for example. Of course, these are both extremes, and many organizations have characteristics somewhere in between.
In an established treasury department, every treasurer has their own style, working methods, and priorities. If you start a new job in such a team, it doesn’t automatically mean you can simply continue what the former treasurer did. It’s most important to recognize where the company’s priorities are. If the company focuses more on forecasting, it will likely receive more attention and become a priority.
Patrick suggests that it’s really up to the treasurer together with the CFO and the company to prioritize where to start. He also stresses that this should preferably be clear before starting a new job and become even more apparent during the first month or two.
Treasury can never work on its own. If you’re a stand-alone treasury, you’re doing something wrong. Treasury is at the company’s heart and should closely collaborate with other stakeholders. On the one hand, it gets cash in from the business and allocates cash out to other businesses. On the other hand, it also ensures that working capital runs smoothly by guaranteeing that there is sufficient risk-free cash available.
Regarding internal stakeholders, Patrick mentioned that a crucial team to work with is procurement because they know how and when you will spend your money. In addition, sales are important because they generate your cash inflows, and any hick-ups in revenue will hurt your cash flows for the coming weeks. You should also always be in close contact with the CFO, who’s probably your boss (or FP&A depending on the organization). With these main internal stakeholders, you need to align at least every week.
Patrick also mentioned that other departments have the tendency to forget to invite treasury to a meeting or start involving them in a project at a later stage, which often brings in last-minute stress and dealing with tight deadlines. So, putting yourself on the map and explaining to stakeholders what treasury is all about is crucial to overcome such challenges.
Another main reason to keep other departments close is that there might be overlapping tasks or systems that other departments also benefit from. Therefore, aligning processes and systems to work most efficiently is critical.
External stakeholders often consist of banks, liquidity providers, and hedging counterparties. But this also depends on the company and how advanced its treasury operations are.
In the end, treasury sits on top of a lot of tasks but also needs to get away from the comfortable treasury chest and be out there as a business advisor. The business, in turn, should know what treasury does, where to find them, and for what purposes.
There are two questions that a treasurer should be able to answer:
The latter is often a lot harder to answer. Interestingly, on the other hand, companies often don’t have any issues knowing how much profit they will make for the year. They know exact P&L figures and current cash at hand yet forecasting remains a challenge.
If you cannot answer both questions perfectly, you should be able to use some tools or techniques to get the response within at least an hour to half a day. In more straightforward treasury organizations, question one can be answered by accessing one, two, or three online banking portals. However, most multinationals have hundreds of banks because no bank can offer bank accounts anywhere in the world.
When treasury is more complex, answering how much cash you have or will have in the future becomes increasingly challenging. With today’s technologies, however, 90 or 95 percent of cash visibility should be available with the push of a button. There are many tools where you can login to view at least end-of-day balances, but you should preferably be able to see intraday balances and real-time balances too.
Moreover, as a treasurer, you should always be forward-looking. There’s always a cash starting position available from which you can calculate how much cash you need next week, for example, and whether the cash position goes up or down. Then you can take it one step further and do the same for a month. By analyzing shifts in cash positions over time, you can also determine whether there’s a financing need.
If you are in need of financing, you may need to talk to your bank. But can they provide financing quick enough? Or do you already have a credit facility that you can use? Depending on the economic circumstances, it can be hard to get a loan if you don’t have a facility, especially when interest rates are higher and there is less cash in the market.
On the contrary, if you notice that there will be cash surpluses, they are just sitting idle. And when interest rates are high, it means losing money on cash sitting in the account. Beyond doubt, it’s wise to have buffers, but if you have more cash than required as a buffer, you need to start examining other possibilities, such as investing it.
Most companies view the treasury department as a cost center, not a profit center. This means that treasury should minimize costs, not focus on maximizing profits while investing. Most companies that embrace this mindset avoid aggressive investments that are high-risk.
Ultimately, of course, depending on the type of business, Patrick Kunz recommends having at least cash visibility for a few months ahead. Typically, it’s 13 weeks because it involves a quarter-end, which is when you need to report and publish polished figures.
Patrick also mentioned that he’s seen a major shift; ten years ago, it was still pioneering to have cash or treasury management solution in place, whereas nowadays, many tools are available at competitive prices, and they are much easier to implement. So, it’s considered quite ancient when treasury reaches a certain size and still uses spreadsheets or logs into different banking platforms.
Patrick mentioned that he still runs into surprising many companies that work manually in each banking portal but notes that they are primarily non-established companies. Especially companies that have seen a lot of growth over a few years can suddenly have 200 to 500 million balance sheets and struggle with their treasury because they have five banks, are active in different parts of the world, and have exploding Excel sheets.
There was one case in particular that Patrick remembered well where a CFO had a little travel pocket bag with all his bank tokens because he needed to access all banks from anywhere. Without them, the CFO wasn’t able to make any payments. These limitations were then quickly tackled by implementing a payment hub and a TMS.
Cash flow forecasting is a challenge because it always depends on different stakeholders’ input to some extent. The trick is to try and automate as much as possible because there’s already a surprising amount of data available in your ERP system that can be used. For example, if you have payment terms of 30 days, your cash outflows should be fixed accordingly. The first month or so forecast can easily be based on receivables and payables as long as all stakeholders are expected to pay on time.
Taxes and salaries are also predictable. It’s easy to estimate how much salaries cost monthly and whether bonuses or seasonality exist. Some companies also need to pay hefty sums of taxes. Then it’s crucial to communicate with the tax department to see when they pay taxes so there is enough cash available according to such forecasts.
More challenging is creating long-term forecasts. They usually include some healthy guesstimate work. For forecasts of two to six months, it’s good to talk to the FP&A department, and examine the ongoing projects, when billing goes out, or when invoices come in. Then it’s also good practice to talk to local managers, controllers, and finance managers, who must manually fill out their estimates. Tools can still help streamline this process. But since the information comes from people, their input must be accurate. Garbage in means garbage out. If the input isn’t precise, neither will your forecast be. So, it’s always recommended to have a critical eye on the data provided. Ask questions, be in touch with vendors, contact the big cash flow drivers, perhaps ignore smaller entities, and be aware of more significant entity cash flow changes.
Sometimes it’s also challenging to have people report on time before specific deadlines. In such situations, it can be good to include a decision-maker and make cash flow forecasting a company-wide priority (if relevant) so that all stakeholders feel the need to comply.
Regarding hedging approaches, it’s essential to ask the CFO what the risk appetite is related to the different risks, such as FX and interest rates. Some companies don’t hedge a 100%, while others do aim to achieve that. A good example of why you don’t always fully hedge: take a company that operates in 50 different currencies but only has 15 that truly impact the business. They will likely only hedge against risk of 15 currencies rather than all 50.
If you’re starting a new job in treasury, you can easily track how successful the company has been in hedging by checking realized or unrealized FX gains or losses in P&L reports. If there are repeating volatile numbers, it means that the company is not hedging properly. As a result, you probably need to drill down further to find out what the underlying reasons are.
The ultimate goal is to determine the company’s exposure. If the exposure cause is known, you can choose the appropriate instruments to hedge against it. For example, you can use a committed derivative for committed exposure, future expected cash flows, AP & AR, and company loans.
Also, if you plan and know there will be exposure in 3 months, you can use a three-month forward to tackle it. Doing one-month forwards wouldn’t create a perfect hedge in such cases. The key is identifying what to hedge against and selecting the most logical hedging instrument.
On the other hand, there are also more unexpected exposures like future M&A deals, expected profits, and expected balance sheet positions. Hedging against these exposures using derivatives would be uncommon, but you might use FX options or internal ways to offset them instead.
Treasury policies are there to love and hate. They can limit how treasury operates and become an obstacle if done wrong. On the other hand, they’re an easy way to show what to do in different situations, for example, financing needs, exposures, and who to contact regarding specific topics. Treasury policies should be written in such a way that they are more of a tool that different stakeholders can easily use.
Your policies should be changed and reviewed at least every year. According to Patrick, if the policy consists of more than twenty pages, you’re doing it wrong, and if it’s shorter than two pages, it’s also wrong. Patrick mentions that you shouldn’t be too detailed in your policies and write them in such a manner that they are easy to understand for non-treasurers—that way, they can easily be distributed to anyone and actually be helpful.
Counterparty risk is always a relevant topic, especially now that some banks are failing again. Treasury needs to see how much cash they have at certain banks and how much risk can be taken, and the exposure per bank should also be defined in the treasury policies. The acceptable amount of acceptable risk differs and comes down to the risk appetite of each company. For example, having a total of 5 billion in cash and only 50 million at a particular bank can feel like low counterparty risk. On the other hand, for another corporate, 50 million at a specific bank can be a substantial amount of money and would be perceived as high risk.
When starting a job, you should determine the risk you’re willing to take with other internal stakeholders. You can, for example, also consider counterparty ratings. Even if there are examples like Lehman brothers collapsing with A ratings and Credit Suisse with a triple B rating, they still provide a better picture of the counterparty’s risk. That said, it’s also vital to be cautious and analyze market dynamics. Small things like rumors in the market can easily affect your risk; if the market decides they don’t trust a bank, it can go down in no time.
Your treasury policies should tackle limits with certain banks and banking groups. It’s wise to minimize counterparty risk to at least three to five core banks to be safe and not overexposed.
Monitoring risk doesn’t need to be done daily but rather monthly or quarterly. Some cash-rich companies can do it every week if they have 12 core banks, for example. In the end, you need to determine the risk appetite, and if you have too much cash at a bank, you should wonder why that’s the case and why you are not investing it instead. You could be investing it in bonds or money market funds that are very low-risk.
Whether you build a more central or regional treasury highly depends on the company, company size, type of company, and type of cash flows. Usually, there’s no 100% central or regional treasury, but something in-between. The good thing about regional treasury is that you’re always in control of your cash in the time zone and specific moment of that region.
With central treasury, the challenge can be that you work in different time zones. When the Asian market is closing, the US market is just waking up. In such cases, you must balance and see that there’s money at HQ and enough from region to region.
A hybrid model can often be the solution where the HQ treasury in Europe receives support from regional treasury centers in Asia, Latin America, and North America. Local presence can be the key to success because of different regional details, products, or other region-specific nuances. For example, it can be especially difficult having treasury operations in countries like China, where there are many regulations. It often requires regional managers with local language skills, knowledge, and connections to the different stakeholders.
Many companies also tackle multiple regions with an ‘around the world’ approach in which Asia sends money to Europe, Europe to the US, and then it’s sent back to Asia again. As a result, the company uses the same money all the time, anytime, in different regions.
There’s no one silver bullet to what you should be doing during your first 180 days in a new treasury job to make a success out of it. It all depends on the context of the company you start working for. Still, this is the advice of an expert that has worked for a significant number of companies, and it can often be applied in various contexts. Feel free to share your thoughts and comments with us as well!
Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below to get more information.
By Alex Cannon
Across 111 European public tenders for treasury systems, training is named in 47% of notices. The highest-ranked treasury capability is FX and hedging, at 13%.
uropean public bodies have to write down what they want from a treasury system, in public, before anyone can bid.
It all gets published on TED, the European Union’s procurement journal.
I looked at 111 notices, published between May 2018 and October 2026.
Training appears in 47% of them.
After that, the highest-ranked treasury capability is FX and hedging, at 13%.
A product that a qualified professional cannot operate without a course has been designed badly.
This market has stopped treating that as a defect and started pricing it in instead.
Some training is unavoidable. A treasury system touches bank mandates, approval limits and payment files and no amount of good design removes the need to show a new user how a particular organization has set those up.
A degree in the domain, 40 hours of instruction and a consultant on call is not that. That is a product nobody can learn by using it.
The newer products in this category are not like this. You open one, click around for an afternoon and it explains itself.
So why are buyers still signing for dinosaur software and then signing again for somebody to explain it?
Nobody buying a treasury system is new to treasury.
The people who will use it know what a forward contract is, what a cash position is, which balances get swept at the end of the day.
The training in these notices is not teaching them their job. It is teaching them the product.
What they are paying to be taught is where things are, what the screens are called, which order the steps go in and what the system wants before it will let you do the obvious thing.
The European Central Bank bought its treasury management system in 2018 for €16,534,744. Since then it has signed two consultancy frameworks for that same system: €7m in 2020 and €11.7m in 2025.
That is €18.7m to be helped with a system it paid €16.5m for. The advice has outgrown the software, at an institution staffed with some of the most qualified treasury professionals in Europe.
A degree in the domain, a budget to learn the software and consultants on retainer for the parts that stay unclear.
Does nobody else find this strange?
| Share of 111 | |
|---|---|
| Training | 46.8% |
| Cloud or SaaS delivery | 21.6% |
| FX and hedging | 12.6% |
| ERP integration | 12.6% |
| Cash flow forecasting | 10.8% |
| Debt and investment | 10.8% |
| Reporting and dashboards | 10.8% |
| Multi-entity groups | 8.1% |
Nobody writes “this software is confusing” into a procurement document.
You can write 40 hours of training into a contract. You can name a number of sessions, a count of on-site days, a trainer’s qualifications. All of it is enforceable, it survives legal review and a bidder can put a price on it.
You cannot write “make it obvious” into a contract.
So the learning curve gets stated in the only currency procurement accepts, which is people and days. Training tops this list not because treasury teams want courses, but because it is the one line where a buyer can put a number on the distance between signing and competence.
Score time-to-competence. Half your peers write training into their requirements.
If “how long until my team runs this without you” is not a line on your scoring sheet, you are scoring a different purchase than the one you are making.
The demo is run by the person who wrote the training. Ask what the fifth week looks like for somebody who wasn’t in the room.
And read a few notices yourself.
Public bodies publish requirement sets at a level of detail corporate buyers keep private, written by people who had to think a whole project through before they were allowed to publish anything.
Public tenders look like an open door. They mostly are not.
A public buyer has to justify the decision in writing, to people who were not in the room.
That incentive produces the oldest reflex in enterprise software: nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
The notice encodes it, through reference requirements, revenue and insurance thresholds, years of comparable deployments and a scoring sheet that rewards the familiar answer.
Nearly half of the treasury software awards that reported a bid count drew a single bid, which is the sound of a decision made before publication.
Unless you hold something specific, an existing relationship with the buyer, a local presence the notice requires, a capability in the specification few others can meet, bidding is an expensive way to lose.
What is useful in these documents is not the opportunity. It is the requirement set, telling you what the incumbents are being paid to compensate for.
None of this is the consultants’ fault. If a system takes a month to explain, somebody is going to get paid to explain it.
That is real work and there is real demand for it.
What I keep coming back to is how calmly it gets signed off. Nobody at the ECB had to argue that the treasury system was hard to use. The money went through as consultancy, twice, five years apart and the word “confusing” never had to appear in a document.
So if you are building in this category, that is the number to look at.
You do not have to beat them on functionality. You have to be the system a treasurer can open on Monday and use by Wednesday with nobody sitting next to them.
Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click the button below.
This article is a contribution from our content partner, PrimeTrade
I never would have thought, at the start of my emerging career as a trade banker, supply chain financier and potential “Master of the Universe” (per Tom Wolfe), that debit notes would be interesting, and that thirty years later I might be writing a blog about them.
But here we are!
It is quite a long post, but this is a topic that merits a detailed treatment, even if the subject matter is rather dry and somewhat technical.
This post sets out five myths about invoices and debit notes.
These myths can lead to various confusions, complications and inefficiencies when it comes to supply chain finance.
The post aims to set out clearly how things normally work in the real world of general ledgers and corporate ERPs. It also digs into the implications for SCF and for the design of platforms that help suppliers to access supply chain finance.
There are generally three strategies used to deal with debit notes in supply chain finance – and these are covered in the final section.
With the right design and approach, debit note recovery can be automated and fully-optimised – no more spreadsheets, no more manual tracking, and no need to get suppliers to deduct debit notes from future invoices.
A debit note acts as the evidence in the buyer’s books for a reduction in its expenses.
So it is issued by the buyer’s accounts payable team to a supplier when the buyer seeks to pay less than it has been invoiced.
For supplier financing transactions (including SCF), a debit note can be an unwelcome event. If an invoice has been financed and even purchased by a financier, the financier typically relies on the invoice being paid in full.
What if I told you that “invoices always get approved”?
A valid invoice is one that is properly addressed, is from a recognised counterparty (ie: a supplier), has the right taxes on it shown in the right way, and which adds up correctly.
Valid invoices always get approved and there is a good reason.
This is a fundamental part of the way financial controls work. A valid invoice has been received representing a claim for payment from a supplier and it will be posted in full to the general ledger.
If this didn’t happen, we would get in a mess very quickly. Accounts payable teams cannot use their discretion and post valid invoices to the general ledger with whatever numbers on them they decide might be right.
Audits would be failed and financial controls would have broken down.
If the invoice from the supplier is for an amount that is too high (for whatever reason), a debit note is raised by the buyer so the supplier gets less money. The question is “what’s the debit note?” not how much of the invoice should be approved.
Some accounts payable teams will, alternatively, ask the supplier to raise a credit note and the invoice remains pending and not posted until the credit note is received. Here, for ease of explanation, we assume the debit note route is the one that the accounts payable team uses.
In the ordinary course of business, accounts payable teams in corporate clients approve payments and not invoices.
A few key points:
This makes supply chain finance and supplier financing tricky – since bankers and lawyers like to think in terms of transactions rather than balances.
Bankers purchase invoices not balances.
Debit notes do not conveniently fit into this model.
Whilst the corporate client may be settling a balance that is due to a supplier (invoices less debit notes),
bankers want the invoices that they have purchased to be paid in full to them.
This is also one of the two main reasons why many corporate clients operate an all-or-nothing model with suppliers when it comes to supplier financing.
These two reasons mean SCF programs can lose a lot of agility. There’s no easy way to move suppliers between financiers, and no easy way to have dynamic management of funding, switching suppliers between financiers whenever needed (even daily) to optimise the use of limits and mix in own treasury funds as a funding source.
I made a statement earlier about “valid invoices always being approved”.
The key question for the accounts payable team when they are deciding what the supplier might be owed is not how much of the invoice to approve.
The key question is: how big should the debit note be?
Yes, that’s right. The full amount of a valid invoice is always posted to the ledger but if there is a reason to pay less than the full amount, then a debit note needs to be raised.
The questions being answered by the accounts payable team reviewing purchase orders, delivery paperwork and the invoice (ie: the 3-way match) are (a) whether a debit note should be raised and (b) how much it should be for?
For example, the invoice face value is 100, but there is a shortage on the delivery of value 5. So that means the invoice of 100 is posted to the ledger, and a debit note of 5 is created and posted – and 95 is the balance on the supplier account, which is what will be settled in due course.
As stated above, the general ledger is an account-based (ie: balance-based) system.
The supplier account is credited with the full amount of the invoices and debited with debit notes to reach the correct amount that should be paid to the supplier when a payment run is operated.
So what is the bank buying when it provides supplier financing?
Is it an “approved payable” (an invoice that is net of specified debit notes) or is it an “approved invoice” (due at face value without deduction)?
This is a key documentary point and one which might not always be clear in the paperwork used to support supply chain finance. On the one hand, the bank wants to buy invoices free and clear of any debit notes. On the other hand, the corporate client may well want the ability to net pre-existing debit notes (at the time of financing) against those invoices.
Is the IPU for the same amount as the invoice? What exactly is the claim that the bank is buying and relying on here – the invoice or the payable amount (at IPU creation-time) in relation to each invoice? If the supplier financing is documented on the basis that the bank is buying the IPU (and not the invoice) – query the accounting treatment and whether the arrangement might then become financial indebtedness in the books of the corporate obligor?
Debit notes “sort of” relate to invoices – but this is an artificial construct and not one that is required in the ordinary course of business.
Companies typically want to collect claims (debit notes) against suppliers immediately. Why wait?
Invoices are posted with a due date (in the future) that reflects when the amount claimed by the supplier should be paid.
Debit notes are often posted with an immedate due date.
That means debit notes are usually collected by set off against the next amount due to be paid to the supplier – ie: as soon as possible. There’s no waiting.
That would be the case even if the debit note might relate to a delivery where the invoice(s) for that delivery are not due to be paid for many days.
And debit notes may also arise that are wholly unconnected with individual deliveries – for example, where there are volume rebates or programme-wide discounts to be recovered.
As mentioned above, settlements clear the due portion of the balance outstanding on the supplier account.
The settlement is calculated by adding up all the transactions that are due and ignoring future-dated transactions. The debit note is always due immediately and is included as soon as possible in any payment that is made to the supplier. The invoice may be due in the future and has to wait.
The idea that this specific debit note goes with that specific invoice is typically a myth when it comes to the practical reality of payables and settlements.
Most platforms ignore debit notes. These are “someone else’s problem”.
That’s why many accounts payable teams don’t like supply chain finance and specifically prefer to limit the size and scope of programs to a handful of large suppliers.
And many SCF platforms ignore debit notes completely.
Corporate clients are expected to provide them with a nice and tidy file of “approved payables” which are guaranteed to be paid in full no matter what else may be going on.
This makes life easy for the platform and easy for the bankers and lawyers involved.
But this also makes life complicated for the corporate accounts payable team.
If clean “approved invoice” or “approved payable” files are to be provided to the SCF platform, this typically means that:
This can mean that many clients end up failing to collect all the debit notes that they might claim, or end up having to track debit notes manually in excel and away from the general ledger. This all leads to extra work for everyone, compromising financial controls and adding costs and complexity.
Yes – it requires a modern approach to the way that the supply chain finance platform is developed and operates.
There are three approaches:
Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click the button below.
This article is written by our partner, Cobase
Oracle NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP platform designed to bring core business processes together in one environment, spanning financial management, reporting and consolidation as well as areas such as billing, projects, CRM and operations. Its multi-entity and multi-currency capabilities make it particularly relevant for organisations whose financial complexity increases as they expand internationally.
Around the core ERP sits a broad ecosystem of implementation partners, technology providers and integrated applications. As companies scale, this ecosystem becomes increasingly important. The ERP may sit at the centre of the finance architecture, but it also needs to connect effectively with the wider financial landscape, including banks, payment providers and other specialist applications.
One of the partners operating in this ecosystem is Novutech, a European finance transformation and NetSuite specialist supporting growing and international organisations with ERP implementation, integration and optimisation.
We spoke with Marta Obrador, Director, Business Transformation Practice & UK Lead at Novutech, about the type of companies NetSuite is best suited to, what makes ERP transformations successful and why bank connectivity should be considered as part of the wider finance architecture.
What type of companies are the best fit for NetSuite, and what makes the platform stand out from other cloud ERP solutions?
“For me, the best fit is really a company in motion: a business that is scaling quickly, expanding internationally or simply dealing with increasing financial complexity.
As organisations add entities, markets and currencies, finance needs more structure without creating more fragmentation. That is where NetSuite is particularly strong. It gives companies a single cloud-based foundation for financial management, consolidation and broader operational processes, while still giving them room to grow.
What matters is that finance teams gain the structure and visibility they need without having to redesign the whole environment every time the business changes.”
As an implementation partner, where do you add the most value and what do successful ERP projects tend to get right from the start?
“Our value lies in connecting people, processes and technology. An ERP project is never only about implementing a system. You also need to think carefully about how people will use it and how the processes around it should work.
The strongest projects usually get a few fundamentals right early on: clear ownership, good-quality data, the right integrations and, importantly, clear priorities.
I also think focus is critical. Companies sometimes try to solve everything at once. The better approach is to focus on what really matters, make good use of best practices and build a realistic path to adoption. That creates a much stronger foundation for the transformation.”
How are customer expectations around finance and treasury changing, and what does that mean for the role of the ERP?
“Finance is moving away from simply recording what happened in the past. Teams are increasingly expected to provide insight, support decisions and help shape what happens next.
That changes the role of the ERP as well. It needs to become a trusted platform for decision-making, not just a place where transactions are recorded.
At the same time, the ERP cannot operate in isolation. If you want finance processes to become truly efficient, it also needs to connect well with banks, payment processes and the wider finance technology landscape. That is where the conversation increasingly moves from ERP alone towards a more connected finance architecture.”
Where does ERP-to-bank connectivity typically become challenging, particularly for companies operating across multiple banks and countries?
“The real challenge is not usually connecting to one bank. Complexity starts to build when a company has several banks, entities, countries, accounts and payment formats, but still wants one consistent process.
Without the right connectivity layer, that complexity often ends up with the finance team. People are moving between bank portals, uploading or downloading files, fixing exceptions and reconciling transactions manually.
As the organisation grows, that becomes increasingly difficult to scale. You may have implemented a strong ERP, but if the banking side remains fragmented, a lot of manual work still remains. Ideally, you want to abstract that complexity away from the finance team.”
What does a strong ERP-to-bank setup look like to you, and what should companies consider when designing it?
“For me, a strong setup creates one trusted flow from payment creation in the ERP through to bank execution and then back into reconciliation and reporting.
Automation is obviously important, but it should never come at the expense of control. You still need clear visibility, the right approvals and enough flexibility to support how the organisation operates.
Companies should also think beyond the situation they have today. If you know you are likely to add entities, countries, banks or accounts, the architecture needs to support that. It is much better to design connectivity as part of the overall finance architecture than to keep adding separate bank interfaces over time.”
Why do you like working with Cobase, and what does combining your ERP expertise with Cobase’s banking connectivity bring to customers?
“What we like about the combination is that it extends the value of NetSuite beyond the ledger and into the day-to-day banking and treasury processes.
NetSuite provides the financial core, while Cobase creates a consistent connection between that core and the banking landscape. For internationally growing companies, that is particularly relevant because the number of banks, accounts and entities can increase quite quickly.
Customers should not have to choose between having a strong ERP and having strong banking connectivity. By combining our NetSuite and transformation expertise with Cobase’s multi-bank connectivity, we can help create a finance architecture that is much more connected and scalable.”
Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click the button below.
