Taking Care of Business with an On-Demand TMS

Embarking on a treasury transformation project to improve payments and reconciliation while providing greater cash visibility, Avalon Health Care Group chose TreasuryXpress as its new TMS partner for this journey. The implementation has yielded huge efficiency benefits for both treasury and accounting, earning Avalon a Highly Commended accolade in TMI’s 2019 Corporate Recognition Awards, for ‘Best’ TMS Solution.

Terry Nelson, Treasury and Accounting Services Manager, Avalon Health Care Group, was keen to connect more banks to the company’s treasury management system (TMS), with the goal of having all of Avalon’s banking relationships on a single platform. The accounting department was also looking to push out payments via a one-stop shop and solve the workflow relating to Positive Pay – an automated cheque fraud detection tool offered by many banks in the US. Their existing TMS solution was not able to accommodate these requirements.

Avalon was spending a great deal of time transmitting the detail around every single cheque to its banks by uploading a file or manually entering it on individual bank portals. After a thorough request for proposal (RFP) process to replace their existing TMS, TreasuryXpress came to the rescue – removing all human intervention from the Positive Pay workflow. Avalon can now access Positive Pay files from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and automatically transmit the files to its banks. “We no longer have to log on to multiple bank portals and all of the manual effort has been automated. We’re delighted with the results,” says Nelson.

Anis Rahal, CEO and Founder of TreasuryXpress, adds: “When I first spoke with Terry and the Avalon team, I understood immediately the frustrations she was experiencing with her previous TMS solution. As a former treasurer myself, I always found it challenging to have to adjust my operations to the inflexible, pre-defined workflows of a TMS. My vision for TreasuryXpress was to create a collaborative solution for treasury teams – one that could provide a structure of best practice automation with the added value of flexibility to accommodate specialised needs.”

Avalon is also leveraging TreasuryXpress to consolidate payment processing and controls by initiating, approving and managing all payments through a single platform. TreasuryXpress offers a customisable workflow approval process that enables a much more streamlined ACH file workflow, eliminating duplication, as well as providing a line of sight and an audit trail.

Another pain point that TreasuryXpress is helping Avalon address is bank reconciliations. “Previously, the process was highly manual – involving Excel spreadsheets and macros – and, as a result, we were working with stale information. Right now, we are collaborating with TreasuryXpress to replace the manual process for reconciliations with an automated workflow, ensuring they are performed daily, without human errors.

“Having up-to-date information will be a huge benefit when it comes to cash visibility and forecasting. We will be able to predict our future requirements far more swiftly and accurately and that process will not be interrupted by staff going on annual or sick leave,” says Nelson. Visibility is also being extended to Avalon’s executive leadership team as the company is being granted access to the TreasuryXpress dashboard, at no extra cost.

Picking a winner

The ability to have access to the TMS for all users, without being nickel and dimed, is one of the factors that drove Nelson to choose TreasuryXpress as a partner. “The majority of vendors will charge you more for additional users, TreasuryXpress doesn’t. As such, we could have the benefits and services that we required without the need for us to reorder our priorities.”

What is arguably most impressive about this partnership and smooth implementation, however, is that all of these benefits have been delivered with minimal disruption. It took just 10 weeks to get the bank connectivity up and running, thereby replacing the company’s previous TMS solution. “As well as being straightforward to implement, the TreasuryXpress model makes it easy to customise the solution for your company’s specific needs – without the additional costs that traditional vendors often tag on,” Nelson comments.

Rahal echoes this, adding: “As a digital software provider, we have the ability to consider our clients’ individual needs and make the right adjustments that will enable them to be successful. For Avalon, their complex bank format requirements were a hurdle that no other TMS provider could overcome. However, because of our digitally powered, on-demand TMS model, we were able to not only supply all of the bank formats they required, we were able to economise them for our client as well. We are honoured to be their partner and are so enormously pleased that the Avalon treasury team has been recognised with this TMI Award for their innovation.”