What Is a Treasury Management System (TMS)?

What Is A Treasury Management System (TMS)?

Treasury management is the act of managing a company’s daily cash flows and larger-scale decisions when it comes to finances. It can provide governance over a company's liquidity, establish and maintain credit lines, optimize investment returns, and strategize the best use of funds.

A Treasury Management System (TMS) is software that a company can utilize to make their treasury management process more efficient with automation. Automating such processes allows for better visibility into cash and liquidity while also providing increased control over bank accounts, improved adherence to compliance standards, and improved management of financial transactions.

Rather than requiring a team of multiple employees to spend their working hours using a host of different tools and data sources to sort out their cash position, a TMS provides visibility into the company’s real-time financial picture—including a real-time look at things like bank balances, financial transactions, and expected cash flows across the entire business. This also makes it significantly easier for decision makers to have a current idea of the company’s finances when making business-critical decisions. A Treasury Management System’s higher visibility into your data also simplifies things like reporting or cash forecasting.

Treasury Management Systems can also include ways to automate and schedule your payments, which can be especially beneficial when dealing with large transaction volume. Modern Treasury’s Payments product, for example, includes custom payment controls, permissions, and approvals to ensure full control over payment initiation. This allows for extra secure payments by minimizing the risk of human error or bad actors.

For reconciliation purposes, a TMS can also help in streamlining otherwise complicated work–especially when using payment automation. Many finance teams will try to solve for the complicated nature of reconciliation with a combination spreadsheets, email, and manual examination of bank statements—processes that are slow, inefficient, and error-prone. A good TMS should alleviate that manual work by reconciling payments, without the need for a team of employees to double-check the work. For example, Modern Treasury’s Automatic Reconciliation reconciles every single payment for our customers by instantly matching them with transactions in their corresponding bank statements.

Additional benefits of a TMS include:

• Streamlined ledgering by automating the process of adding entries to the company’s General Ledger.
• For businesses utilizing cash pooling, a TMS can provide easy access to managing notional and physical cash pools—allowing you to offer real-time intercompany positions, interest calculations, and reporting.
• Bank integrations and relationship management.
• Simplified compliance with industry regulations, like AML or KYC, for example.
• Financial transactions become fully trackable in-real time, providing your company with total visibility into how, when, where, and why your money is moving.

A good Treasury Management System should support your business’ unique needs. At Modern Treasury, we provide our customers with everything from faster payments and real-time data visibility to efficient workflows and bank integrations. For more information about how Modern Treasury can help your business, reach out to us here.