In today’s unpredictable landscape, managing cash flow and liquidity has become more challenging. As a result, more businesses are turning their focus towards improving their cash management operations.

Yet, despite digital advances, many companies still rely on manual processes to manage cash reserves. A global survey found that 34% of businesses cite low levels of automation as their biggest cash management challenge.

The business impact

Manual cash management often involves tracking balances, forecasting liquidity, and reconciling accounts via spreadsheets. Adjustments for payroll, supplier payments, and loans are typically manually entered based on emails or reports from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

While this approach may work, it’s slow, error-prone, and lacks real-time visibility. Mistakes in data entry or forecasting can lead to cash shortfalls or missed investment opportunities.

Yet these manual processes often serve as the glue that connects accounting activities across a wide array of complex systems and data sources, which explains why businesses are hesitant to move away from them.

But the cost to productivity is clear. Finance teams spend an average of 26 hours per week on manual treasury tasks such as reconciliations, spreadsheet maintenance, and cash monitoring alone. 

Dealing with financial discrepancies can take an average of 44 hours per week. This workload can lead to decreased motivation, with employees who feel overworked 70% more likely to burn out, as they try to manage unreasonable time constraints.

Looking to change

Automation streamlines cash management, making processes faster, more accurate, and more reliable. This transformation reduces operational risk and frees up team members to focus on higher-value activities.

Some companies now use AI-driven reconciliation tools that match transactions in real time, eliminating manual entry errors. A study published in 2024 demonstrated that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems can achieve perfect accuracy in data extraction tasks, significantly outperforming human-driven processes in both efficiency and precision.

Centralised dashboards also improve visibility, giving treasurers an accurate picture of company finances.

Our Savings inertia report shows that too much of the UK’s cash is left sitting idle, leaving significant value untapped. To maximise the yield on their cash reserves, some businesses are turning to high-interest savings platforms. These platforms enable them to open and manage savings accounts with multiple banks through a single platform.

They also eliminate the burden of applying to and onboarding with each bank separately. Some offer tools that allow CFOs to achieve the right balance between liquidity, yield, and security within their portfolio by spreading their reserves across multiple accounts.

Automated platforms serve as strategic levers to both protect and grow idle business cash, requiring minimal effort from finance teams.

While finance specialists have used data to build forecasts and predictions for years, the addition of AI and other technologies improves accuracy and enhances potential. This is where predictive analytics are helpful, as they process large amounts of data, quickly, into useful insights, like estimating revenues, costs, behavioural patterns and even effects of macroeconomic factors.

The automation dividend

Automating manual tasks not only reduces errors and saves time – it unlocks what we call the ‘automation dividend’ – the ability for employees to focus on high-value work that drives growth and supports career development.

Research supports this concept. More than 90% of workers in a Salesforce study agreed that automated processes had improved their productivity.

There are plenty of real-world examples showcasing the benefits of automation too. The Coca-Cola Company began reviewing its existing process for balance sheet reconciliations across 50,000 general ledger accounts. It discovered 800 associates were spending 14,000 hours a month on this one task. By moving from manual processes to automation, Coca-Cola reallocated 40% of its team to more strategic roles like metrics reporting, and change governance.

eBay saw similar gains by moving away from manual accounting to automation – it decreased the length of its financial close from 10 days to just three.  

In conclusion, automating cash management is useful for both small and large companies. Not only does it drive operational efficiency and maximise the potential of cash reserves, but it also empowers employees to focus on higher-value, strategic work. In turn this creates a healthier, happier, and more productive workforce.

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