What applications are out there to assist in cash forecasting and more effective management of cash and core treasury tasks?

Scott,

There are a number of treasury workstation vendors out in the market who offer the same treasury workstation functions:

* Daily cash position worksheet
* Target balances
* Debt and investment management
* Funds transfer
* Communications
* Account reconciliation
* Bank relationship database
* Cash forecasting
* General ledger interface
* Report writing
* Utilities and security

1. My first question would be who is your current ERP provider? All of the big ERP providers offer a treasury workstation that can just plug into your existing infrastructure (i.e., SAP TW).

2. Is one of your requirements FX hedging?

3. Do you require FAS 133 reporting?

As you can see the requirements drive the solution. You may want to reach out to your financial institution to see what types of treasury services they offer that you're currently not taking advantage of.

In regards, to your question about why Treasurers should care about Cloud Computing and SaaS, I would respond that you're most likely already using SaaS (i.e., Expense Reporting, AP Workflow, ERP, CRM, etc.). SaaS offers a low cost and low maintenance service to end users that doesn't require the hardware and resource CapEX.

Regards,
Pete

Pete,

Thanks for your response, but I was looking for insight into Cloud and SaaS based applications not treasury workstation/ERP insights. I am a pretty "seasoned" treasury professional.

What do Cloud and SaaS providers (NetSuite, Host Analytics, et al) offer to us treasury professionals?

Best regards,

Scott

Scott,
Kyriba is a SaaS treasury management tool. I haven't used it my self, but I seena a demo and it does seem to lend itself to forecasting. RC

I know FiREapps has a great SaaS application for cash management/ treasury data focused on corporate foreign exchange exposures. I hope this helps.

Chris Hopkins

IT2 Treasury Solutions does propose hosted and ASP solutions for the Treasury community. Whether your SaaS understanding is technical (not having the files on your site, caring about the maintenance of your database, benefiting from host secured and multi-site network), delivery-related (implementation time, out-of-the-box workflows and tools) or commercial (avoiding CAPEX as much as possible), IT2 has answered to clients' project requirements (including cash forecasting) for years.

Why should Treasurers care? The answer is they shouldn't be too much bothered about technical deliveries or commercial negotiation, as long their needs for a functional solution are answered within the boundaries of their constraints.

I'll be glad to put you in relation with one of our relationship managers. Have a look at IT2's website: www.it2tms.com

I've been using Adaptive Planning for the past few months and it has worked quite well for our forecasting. Prior to Adaptive, everything was in Excel.. after a little implementation and tweaking, our entire model is now in Adaptive and linked up to NetSuite. We use it not only for cash/balance sheet forecasting, but for all of our P&L forecasting/ budgeting as well- just pull in the actuals from NetSuite and play with assumptions to see how certain scenarios play out. I dont deal with them directly, but Fx is incorporated into NetSuite and im sure can be linked with Adaptive.