Published: April 10, 2013
Achieving more visibility, control and efficiency are key drivers in today’s business environment. This also applies to the cash and liquidity management processes. Understanding where your cash is, is a first crucial step to drive down dependency on external credits, identify potential cash shortfalls, and put your working capital to work.
Within many organisations it is still very common to use spreadsheets for collecting and passing on cash management information. This process is obviously more error prone, non-automated and can only be done with limited frequencies, due to the amount of time required. While much investment in ERP systems has been done, the cash management automation is lacking.
The greater the scale of operations and the complexity of corporate structure the more visible the limitations of spreadsheets become in day-to-day cash management and liquidity planning. Cash management teams spent many manual activities on the Excel-based forecasting process. Despite its flexibility the cash management information is not updated in real time, not even near real time. When, for example, commodity prices suddenly change the cash flow forecasts need to be adapted. In the case of spreadsheets this needs to be done manually. Hence, the data generated from spreadsheets is far from being reliable or quickly available.
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Specialised SAP-embedded cash management solutions allow organisations to retrieve cash management information at any point in time. Automated retrieval and assignment of data from all entities and across different relevant systems provide a company-wide overview of cash flows and form the basis for automated plan/actual analyses and scenario simulations. The manual effort is eliminated and organisations can benefit from up-to-date information and standardised and compliant procedures across all entities world-wide. Moreover, they can flexibly define plan groups, extend planning horizons, vary the granularity of reports and achieve a rolling liquidity planning.[[[PAGE]]]
If you want to effectively and better manage cash and plan liquidity for the longer term, automation is key. A professional solution that provides automation, integration, and reliable information at all times should be looked for. The particular benefit of specialised and SAP-integrated software lies in the fact that it combines the best of both worlds: the flexibility of spreadsheets with the comprehensiveness of the SAP environment. Moreover, by introducing an integrated solution, corporations can capitalise on their existing SAP investment and benefit from the familiar look and feel of the solution. When selecting a new solution, corporations should also ensure that the software is able to automatically integrate the data of the non-SAP entities. With the right tool you will be able to drive enormous efficiency gains.
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