Treasury Reporting

Treasury reporting is special. Risk-focused.

Much has been written about reporting and even more has been tried. In most companies, reporting is a process that consists of a few basic elements and has been changed very often in the past due to constantly changing requirements. These requirements can be of an internal and/or external nature. An example of an internal requirement is the recipient's wish to include one or other piece of information. Less often, there is a request to omit information. However, the higher up the recipient of the report is in the company, the more condensed yet meaningful the information needs to be.
This is why the vast majority of companies have standard reports, usually extracted from the ERP system, which are then supplemented with other sources of information, usually in Microsoft Excel, in an extremely laborious manual process, so that they ultimately reflect the desired result of the client or beneficiary. The art of the creator must be to provide as little as possible and as much as necessary. This requires:

1. Know what the beneficiary require. The beneficiary is usually a generalist and does not have the specialized knowledge of the person preparing the report. In short: empathy plays a major role.
2. Specialist knowledge of the areas being reported on.
3. Understanding the content of the report!
4. Technical system knowledge, e.g. extracting raw data from the ERP or treasury system, good Excel skills.
5. Strong communication and organizational skills, especially when reports are changed or added, which requires the cooperation of many other people, e.g. in the subsidiaries.

Point 5 in particular is a problem for many reporting specialists. The complexity and the project effort, which should not be underestimated and which entails even small changes, especially when other areas are usually also affected, sooner or later lead to a situation in almost all companies where reporting is inadequate, non-transparent and therefore even dangerous for the company (because it is not known). The RTD effort is one thing, but the result is another. The following is an overview of the reports that are generally used by every company in the treasury area. 

This structure, which at first glance appears to be extraordinarily extensive, is essential to ensure secure operations and shows that Treasury is one, if not the central point in the company where information flows together from all directions. In smaller and medium-sized companies, these reports are often decentralized, e.g. in accounting or controlling. However, it not only makes sense to have these reports prepared by a single department for reasons of efficiency, but also to be able to provide the content and, above all, the correlations in the best possible way and without redundancies. 

As already mentioned above, a distinction must be made between 

a) daily execution, 

b) periodic checks for suitability, 

c) changes, and 

d) setting up new reporting structures. 

While a) is carried out by permanent staff, it is advisable to call in external expertise for points b), c) and d) in order to not only satisfy the reporting recipients, but also to ensure the security of the company. 

Excel reporting

As mentioned above, Excel is a key tool for treasurers and controllers. We have successfully introduced Excel reporting structures (even in large corporations). Afterwards standard reporting may be more useful to manage the daily reporting business. For this, a specialised treasury software is recommended. 

Ask us for your ideal reporting structure! We have experience in the implementation and optimization of Treasury SAP, ION (Reval), Coupa (Bellin) and numerous supporting tools, such as TIPCO, Bloomberg, FXall, ThomsonReuters, Fides, Finavigate .