In the complex and fast-paced modern business world, you need an advanced set of treasury solutions to keep your information secure, increase your operational efficiency, and improve your cash flow. Read more on how treasury solutions can help improve your productivity and simplify workflow.
In the modern business world, convenience is an expectation. Many seek efficiency, especially when it comes to speeding up the administrative side of your business accounts. Treasury solutions are at the forefront of improving productivity and simplifying workflow.
Outdated systems can significantly impact cash flow and slow down processes within your business. But implementing modern treasury solutions can negate these inefficiencies, increasing productivity internally and solving pain points simultaneously.
There are several foundational technologies modern businesses need to update their treasury processes. Here are the most important solutions to consider for your company.
How Modern Treasury and Payment Solutions Help Your Clients
Building a robust treasury is simple if you’re using the right technology. Advanced solutions have extensive capabilities designed to streamline payables and receivables.
Additionally, information management technology can optimize cash flows through automation and forecast trends based on data analysis. Fraud management monitors trends to catch anomalies and alert you to suspicious activity.
The digital age has sped up business processes exponentially—and without digital treasury solutions it’s easy to fall behind. But the right technological integrations can ease your administrative workload while vastly improving your productivity.
Updating your treasury solutions is a value-adding service to your client. Automated payments can grant access to cost-saving benefits. Fewer processing errors and more reliable transaction schedules can result from guaranteeing good timing.
Clients also gain additional benefits in the form of insights into their cash flow—which empowers them to engage in fact-based financial planning.
In a volatile economy, access to working capital is critical. Manual treasuries tie up capital in lengthy transactions. These slow down business and carry the costs associated with increased manual workloads and reduced efficiencies. Digital solutions solve these issues for both your corporate office and your client.
Ultimately, the benefits of transforming your treasury far exceed the challenges of a system update. For example, here are some of the direct benefits your clients will garner when you switch to a modern payment solution.
Treasury Solutions: Client Benefits
Upgrading your treasury solutions is mutually beneficial for both your company and your client. There can be no denying that it’s a value-adding proposition, especially for middle-market businesses that can benefit enormously from increases in efficiency.
Of course, in a competitive landscape, bringing additional perks to your clients can make all the difference. These include:
Increased Efficiency and Cost Reduction
These two go hand-in-hand. Automated B2B transactions have significant benefits for both you and your client. Digital payments can reduce cash application and reconciliation timeframes to the same day. All this happens while increasing entry accuracy by automatically moving funds directly from your client's account to yours.
The labor-saving benefits for you and your client are immense. AP and AR departments have additional time to focus on cash flow data analysis which can further optimize financial decision-making.
Increased Trust
Transparency between you and your client fosters a better working relationship. Digital transactions increase visibility, thereby allowing valuable information to be accessed immediately. The client experience is also improved, as transactions are complete almost immediately upon initiation.
Reduced Risk
Digital treasury solutions have significantly fewer risks and higher security than manual counterparts. Transactions are conducted from secure gateways, and machine learning or AI technology monitors them in real-time.
Understanding the improvements an upgrade will bring to your office is essential before selecting your treasury system upgrades. So, here’s a breakdown of the different elements of a modern treasury, starting with managing payables.
Managing Payables With Cutting-Edge Payment Solutions
A surprising number of businesses are still running their AP departments on manual or even paper-based processes—this despite the fact that falling behind digital advancements can carry significant penalties.
The silver lining to this, however, is that it does present an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage if you’re ready to transform your treasury system. To see how, you must first understand the drawbacks of manual payable processes compared to their digital counterparts.
- Missing Invoices: This simple human error can wreak havoc on your accounting team. Losing a supplier’s invoice in the shuffle can negatively impact your working relationship and make you appear unreliable. Also, missing invoices result in late liabilities on your balance sheet.
- Decreased Transparency: Manual processes almost lack real-time information—a fact compounded by the increased likelihood of errors, resulting in added stress surrounding every transaction.
- Increased Workload: Your AP team is responsible for managing all the discrepancies accompanying human invoice errors. Therefore, more inconsistencies result in an increased workload.
Finding a Solution
Mitigating the cost of manual processes is as simple as integrating a cutting-edge payment solution. Your AP department will be able to augment its work with automation, which will drive internal efficiency and increase accuracy.
No substitute can match the ability to monitor cash flow in real-time. It empowers your team to complete transactions more quickly and correctly, freeing up their time to work on higher-order company goals.
Critical factors like optimizing financial management, improving vendor relationships, and providing valuable insights for company leadership can become more central to the department.
Of course, selecting the right solution is essential. Illinois Bank & Trust, a division of HTLF Bank is your reliable partner that specializes in assessing current payment processes and implementing solutions to help you develop an effective payables strategy. With a variety of customizable solutions, our team can help you automate 100 percent of your AP.
Fraud Management Made Easy With Treasury Technologies
When it comes to finding new ways to break through digital security measures, bad actors are always innovating. They often employ the latest digital technology to construct sophisticated veils that conceal fraudulent activities.
Falling victim to these schemes is typical for companies without a secure infrastructure to protect their business—and these unlucky enterprises often lose a staggering amount of money.
Outdated processes and older systems simply aren’t robust or capable enough to protect your capital. Upgrading your treasury technology can save you uncountable amounts of money as fraud becomes more common and increasingly devastating to honest businesses.
Detect Fraud & Better Protecting Your Business
Solutions such as Check and ACH Positive Pay act as another layer of protection for your funds. With Check and ACH Positive Pay business leaders can remain in control as money is moving in and out of the business. ACH blocks and filters can prevent fraudulent ACH debits and ACH credits from being posted to your account. Checks continue to be the primary target for fraudsters thus when using this payment method businesses must do so with extreme caution. To fight check fraud and forgery, Check Positive Pay compares checks presented for payment to the checks issued off the account in the past while also verifying the check number, account number and dollar amount. Any discrepancies are sent to an approver to either be paid or rejected.
Middle-market businesses cannot hire an entire surveillance team to monitor every transaction. And even if they did, human error would still place them in greater jeopardy than using a sophisticated fraud detection solution within their treasury.
Timing is another crucial component of catching fraud, which is why Positive Pay bridges the gap between suspicious activity and your opportunity to respond.
Handling Receivables With Modern Treasury Services
It's well documented that AR departments operate less efficiently when running manual processes. Research has shown that when compared to automated AR systems, manual processes require 67% longer to follow up on overdue payments. Economic slowdown and a high interest rate environment is forcing many businesses to focus their attention on aging AR. Inefficiencies within payment collection processes could be causing additional stress on your cash flow.
On the other hand, automating your receivables process has an equally sizable set of benefits. Accelerating collections and creating efficiencies with solutions such as Lockbox, eDeposit, ACH receivables, Mobile Deposit and wire transfers will reduce aging AR and further optimizing your working capital.
Many of these solutions also eliminates manual data entry and reduces the amount of time your staff needs to spend on receiving payments. Merchant Services is another great receivables solution for businesses that transact in a B2C nature by offering their customers the payment flexibility they desire.
When you automate AR processes, you can post remittance data and payments at the same time. Meaning not only can you receive your payments more quickly, but you can also increase the rate at which you apply them. This greatly improves your cash flow and frees up additional time for your staff, which they can spend overseeing less arduous, more goal-oriented tasks.
AR treasury solutions also allow for real-time visibility and increased security. Plus, setting up automated invoice processing, credit controls, and payment reminders can increase your operational precision.
Optimize Cash Flow With Information Management
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Information management solutions empower you to optimize your company’s finances through increased data visibility, analytics-based forecasting, and automation.
Digital learning models will pick up on trends in your cash flow and show you potential bottlenecks, empowering you to make decisions that will improve the financial health of your business. Plus, automation will reduce the costly impacts of manual processes.
Forecasting
Forecasting the ups and downs in your financial future can help you navigate the inevitable shortfalls and surpluses you’ll generate, especially during tumultuous times.
Being proactive rather than reactive about adjusting your operations will result in smoother outcomes. Also, payment systems can create predictive models of clients, and preemptively go to efforts to collect from those that are often late by sending out early reminders.
Forecasting can be used in a variety of different ways. Access to key data-based insights enables the handling inventory management, investment decisions, and project cost control more efficiently. Information management solutions can amalgamate data from multiple sources to provide you with a complete analysis.
Furthermore, information management solutions allow you to conveniently control your finances across devices.
You’ll be able to manage payments, perform bulk ACH processing, and access audit requirements remotely. Plus, you can create customizable reports that integrate your banking data with your accounting platform. All of which is enhanced with advanced security solutions.
Choose a Financial Partner With Modern Treasury Solutions
In the complex and fast-paced modern business world, you need an advanced set of treasury solutions to keep your information secure, increase your operational efficiency, and improve your cash flow.
Integrating updates to your system will be beneficial not only for your AR and AP departments but also for your clients. It’s a value-adding proposition that benefits your entire business ecosystem.
One of the most important determiners of your company’s financial well-being is the partners you work with. Picking a reliable partner with extensive expertise in middle-market growth will help you reach your long-term goals.
Our team at Illinois Bank & Trust, a division of HTLF Bank is ready to help you optimize your working capital by designing a tailored payables and receivables strategy.