Hanse Orga’s recent webinar ‘Manage your eBAM process from inside your ERP’ revealed that the problems haven’t changed much:

• lack of control and compliance
• time consuming, manual and error prone procedures
• significant fraud and auditing risks
• sub-optimal bank relationship management due to lack of central information on bank offerings and little assessment detailed assessment of bank performance.

Bank account management

Hanse Orga showed how to meet these bank account management challenges - increasing visibility and control over all accounts group wide; using structured processes; and tightly monitoring bank service fees - by centralising BAM data and workflow, as shown below:

Source & Copyright©2016 - Hanse Orga 

Bank fee analysis and management

The Hanse Orga eBAM solution reconciles the invoiced bank fees with expected, and even generates e-mails to the bank asking about the discrepancies. To overcome the lack of usage of common standards in bank fee analysis Hanse Orga accept all types of bank reporting:

Source & Copyright©2016 - Hanse Orga 

Clearly the webinar attendees would welcome such a service, because in a poll 75% of the respondents “Knew there are errors in the bank statements, but had no time to chase.”

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CTMfile take: This webinar showed that the basics of effective eBAM have not changed. The first step is to centralise and normalise all bank account information which is probably a lot easier to do within your ERPs. The second step, which is only useful after you have really completed step one, is to automate the collection of full information on the bank statements/invoices from all your banks. This requires a system that accepts and can interpret three types of billing information - Standard Format, Proprietary Format, Unformatted  - and then can compare it with bank market data. Not easy, but do-able as Hanse Orga showed.