All companies need to carefully manage their cash in order to ensure that sufficient funds are always available to support business operations, however, in today’s global enterprises, it can be difficult to maintain clear visibility and management of diverse cash repositories. This can be especially challenging when subsidiaries and other operating units maintain separate external banking relationships within their regional or local environments.

I’ve previously touched on related issues in blog posts on Working Capital Management and the need for a Global Approach to Cash Management. In this post, we are going to take a closer look at another key tool which is called In-House Cash Management.

RevRec - Best Practices in Feature Pack and S/4 Migration

October 22, 2019 - 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EDT

If you are a CFO or treasury executive in a globally diverse company, then you're probably already aware of the complexities regarding cash management across multiple business units in many different countries.

Technical Accounting Tips for Optimizing Disclosures and Reporting for ASC 606 and 842

This webinar includes a discussion of Top Ten Technical Accounting Tips for accelerating financial reporting disclosures, which have been gleaned from Bramasol's experience guiding our clients through real-world issues surrounding ASC 606 and ASC 842.compliance.  We've also seen what doesn't work by helping companies overcome false starts and dead-ends.

Examples of the implementation situations covered includes:

• An oil and gas services company found over 100 additional leases in a subsidiary that the corporate office did not realize were still being paid and expensed because it was small amounts and lessors typically would not tell you and allow it to go month to month!
  Lesson Learned: Know where your leases are!
  
  
• A large pharmaceutical company underestimated the data abstraction process and delayed the project by five months because not only did the leases have to be abstracted but also interpreted by outsid
  e leasing accountants.
  Lesson Learned: Better upfront planning can avoid cost overruns and time delays!

Working capital is the lifeblood of most organizations and, as such, it needs to be watched closely and managed in a comprehensive, real-time, and proactive manner.

All finance departments must manage working capital to keep their business operations running, while maintaining the agility to support the strategic goals and growth objectives of their business. Working capital management and optimization are key to assuring a business can maintain production, cover the cost of wages and supplies – and also have enough liquidity on hand to service their short-term credit obligations.

Any gaps are likely to be filled by external capital – usually at a higher cost than internally available funding. Being able to accurately measure and manage working capital, and avoid expensive external financing, can provide companies with an important competitive advantage.

Most CFOs use working capital as a key indicator of the operating health of the business. They focus on questions such as: Are we collecting our bills in a timely manner? Are we taking all the discounts that we are entitled to? Are we carrying too much inventory in our warehouses?

These basic metrics all have a direct impact on liquidity. However, the answers to these key working capital questions are inherently dynamic and constantly changing.

As we move into Fall, there are a number of important events coming up for CFOs and other finance leaders, where you'll get a chance to network with colleagues and talk with experts in creating and implementing solutions for treasury, compliance, disclosure reporting and other related finance management issues.  Bramasol is proud to be a participant and in some cases an enabling sponsor for the following key conferences.  Please plan to join us.

Treasury functions are not easily isolated from the rest of operational applications that are typically spread throughout an organization – nor should they be.  In fact, almost all treasury processes can benefit greatly from becoming more integrated with other business processes. 

However, all too often, companies are enticed by the promises of standalone treasury and risk management applications that claim to be inter-operable but fall short of providing true seamless integration with core ERP business and finance applications.

The strategic importance of treasury has been increasing steadily in recent years, thereby leading to a proliferation of new capabilities from both standalone application vendors and broad-based ERP/finance systems providers.

Companies are also coming under more pressure from shareholders and regulators to increase their transparency and improve financial performance. These expectations are leading to significant changes to the treasury functions as activities are increasingly being centralized. 

At the same time, most companies are experiencing more complexity with regard to changing compliance requirements, diverse global operations, regional and local regulatory mandates, international trade and foreign currency issues, geographically diverse banking relationships and escalating risk factors in the financial arena.