A Day in the Life: Streamlining Treasury in Business Central

Finance professionals bring the bank to their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central environment with FISPAN's bank-branded embedded app. FISPAN helps streamline daily treasury processes, allowing you to directly manage your payables, view all bank account and transaction details, eliminate manual uploads, automate your reconciliation, and more, all from within Business Central.

Meet Avery: The Finance Professional 

finance professionalMeet Avery: A fictitious finance professional working in Treasury for a medium-sized business. Amidst changing external environments, Avery is poised to chart a successful growth path for her team. PwC Canada’s CFO Survey illustrated the importance of building a resilient financial department, as teams navigated change and uncertainty throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the financial department from the CFO, to the Bookkeeper, Cash Clerk, and Corporate Treasurer demands continue to increase as finance professionals like Avery have a larger seat at the table.

[Avery’s] Day in the Life 

Finance professionals like Avery wear many hats: from ensuring the organization has the necessary financial resources to engage in day-to-day operations, to assessing and advising based on the firm’s risk profile, their role demands they be up-to-date and poised to generate insights and recommendations. 

On any given day, treasurers like Avery may engage in the following core treasury functions, among others: 

  • Cash Management: Avery collects and manages short-term assets, ensures day-to-day functionality and optimizes the firm’s liquidity. Avery ensures that the firm’s daily financial obligations can be met.

  • Risk Management: Foreign exchange, credit, operational, liquidity, and interest rate risks… Avery must prepare for changing financial conditions and ensure her organization is prepared for variable expenditures. Avery is tasked with mitigating risks, assessing their potential impact, and charting recommendations based on her analysis.

  • Accounts Receivable (AR) / Accounts Payable (AP):  Tying into the firm’s cash management, the management of AP and AR (management of the firm’s short-term liabilities and current assets, respectively) is an important role for finance teams. In processing invoices and verifying that payments are appropriately made at the opportune time, Avery strengthens relationships with suppliers, generates accurate cash forecasts, and optimizes her organization’s working capital. On the other hand, in ensuring invoices are received and following up on outstanding payments, the AR function ensures that payments are received in a timely manner. AP and AR is crucial for Avery to evaluate the organization’s financial well-being. 

  • Reconciliation: Reconciliation ensures that data is correct; it is the method of comparing sets of records (such as bank statements and accounting books) to ensure that there are no discrepancies between each. Through reconciliation, Avery mitigates fraud, prevents balance sheet errors, and ensures that records are in agreement.

Meeting Demands Through Technology 

Manual (and often tedious) functions are still used by Avery to import data, ensure accurate records, analyze the firm’s financial well-being, and complete the day-to-day tasks of a treasurer. These manual interventions, repetitive entries, and rapidly-changing environments equate to human error, and divert time and attention away from high value-add activities. In a 2021 report exploring finance professionals’ sentiments, 64-69% of respondents noted there to be negative impacts towards their organization due to a lack of process automation. 

Avery can turn to technology to increase productivity and elevate her role. In automating otherwise manual and tedious processes, team members save time for high-value activities and are able to quickly generate comprehensive data insights. Findings from softwarepath demonstrate the incredible potential offered by accounting software, allowing companies to nearly eliminate errors caused by manual data entry (by 90%).

ERPs: The Treasurer’s Bread and Butter 

Wanting to drive more efficiency for her team, Avery opts to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. ERP systems act as an integral component of any team’s operations. Acting as a centralized system across departments, cross-functional teams can better collaborate, integrate their data, and understand their organization’s standing. For Avery, this means she no longer has to navigate between reports to reconcile data, cross-reference transactions across departments, or manually pour over spreadsheets to generate valuable insights. In an ERP market facing rapid expansion, the accountant’s role is identified as the most integral ERP function (89%) for companies looking to purchase ERP solutions. It’s no wonder that the Accountant’s day is largely spent within these systems!  

cloud apiThe importance of streamlined data cannot be underestimated in the finance function. In the same PwC Canada CFO Survey referenced earlier, respondents placed the implementation of cloud-based solutions as a key next step for their teams. Notable benefits of cloud-based solutions like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems included increased access to data and more opportunities for actionable insights. The trend towards cloud-based technology is reflected in the adoption of cloud-based ERPs, as the majority (53%) of organizations elect for cloud-based ERP solutions over on-premise platforms.

ERP Spotlight: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 

Wanting to increase efficiency for her team, Avery uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central; a cloud-based ERP solution. The business management solution enables greater connectivity across departments: from sales, service, operations, and finance. Through Dynamics 365 Business Central, Avery can streamline her process workflows, take actionable insights with reporting tools, and gain greater visibility into her organization — crucial for eliminating manual errors and streamlining automation! 

What’s Missing: The Solution to Avery’s Treasury Dilemma 

While the adoption of an ERP system has undoubtedly increased efficiency for Avery’s team, pain points still exist within the treasury process (hint: it’s banking integrations!). When working through her treasury function, Avery finds herself needing to navigate between her banking portal and ERP system: going from tab to tab, checking bank statements and books to reconcile, and manually inputting data from one portal to another. For Avery, that manual entry equates to time that she could otherwise be spending on high-value activities.  

ERPs and Banking

FinTechs (like FISPAN) can help treasurers like Avery streamline their treasury management functions. FISPAN is the bridge between the finance professional’s bank and Business Central environment. Through APIs, core banking capabilities are embedded within the ERP environment. This connection enables finance professionals to conduct their treasury functions directly within their ERP: treasurers can view their ERP and bank data in one simple portal, streamline their reconciliation, and automate their treasury management process. 

 

With FISPAN, Avery’s “day in the life” simplifies with streamlined treasury management solutions in her Business Central environment: 

  • Payments & Status: ​​Pay ACH, Wire, and Check payment rails from within the Business Central environment 
  • International Payables: Settle bill payments that have up-front ramifications for Foreign Exchange (FX)
  • Information Reporting: Stop navigating back and forth from tab to tab. View bank account and transaction details all in one portal 
  • Positive Pay File: Print checks in-house where Positive Pay files are transmitted directly to the bank   
  • A2A Transfer: Easily transfer funds from account to account  
  • Bank Feeds: Automatically import bank statements into the reconciliation module within the native Business Central environment

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Interested in how you can seamlessly integrate banking capabilities into your ERP environment, like Avery? Learn more about FISPAN’s embedded app specific to Business Central.

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