Global Cash Visibility
After forecasting cashflows, the next step in cash and liquidity management is to ensure full visibility of all cash to determine the available cash balances world-wide. Ideally, this should be by the end of the business day and preferably, where it is cost-effective to do so and particularly for high-value receipts, intra-day. To achieve this is not easy, few companies have an accurate and up-to-date view of their global cash position because little balance and transaction data is received in real-time, much is 1-2 days and some even >2 days old. Even so, real-time data is not always cost-effective. In many cases, a delay of a few minutes is often acceptable.
Cash position reporting requires automation of all the corporate treasury department's functions for collecting bank balance and transaction data. It is vital to monitor whether balance and transaction reports have been received and chase those reports that have not arrived either using the treasury management system or bank or third party services.
Reporting and Collection Services
All cash management banks provide bank account balance and transaction data via their own electronic banking (EB) reporting services, and most offer a 'post-office' service to collect balance and transaction reports via SWIFT from the clients' other banks. Alternatively, companies can have a direct connection to SWIFT or via a SWIFT service bureau (see Connectivity section) and collect the data direct from their banks. The cash and treasury management system suppliers all provide auto dial and data collection functionality to collect bank account data using direct connection to the banks's EB services or via SWIFT, and/or via a communication hub. On the other hand, companies can use one of the specialist aggregators of bank balance and transaction data.
Bank Account Data Reporting and Collection Services
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There are considerable differences between the reporting services. The first differentiation between the banks is the number of countries from which they can provide full end of day reporting from their own branches and whether intra-day reporting is also available. The number of countries covered ranges from five or more to over 100.
Another important difference between the services is the availability of a report monitoring and chasing service, which monitors whether banks have reported expected bank account and transaction data and chases the missing data if not reported. Other differences include how many local reporting standards as well as the BAI (Bank of Administration Institute) standards and SWIFT standards are covered; and the speed and availability of intra-day transaction data.