Full article here: https://treasury360.net/treasury-news/treasury-technology/clever-api-solution-put-the-full-account-overview-at-his-fingertips/

“Now, my team and I can simply open the dashboard and instantly view our cash balance”

Says Jacob Koch. The near real-time visibility has changed his group’s liquidity management, allowing for more informed decision-making. Better Energy operates approximately 350 renewable projects across four countries. Each project functions as a separate company with one or more bank accounts per company, spread out across multiple banks. “Every time we had to check our liquidity, we had to review over 450 bank accounts across eight banks with different setups,” Koch explains.

“I can basically now look at the cash balances on my phone and decide if I go to work or stay in bed.”

This process took around 2 ½ hours and provided data that was at least a day old. Due to the time-consuming nature of the task for a team of three treasurers, they only conducted these checks once a week. This posed a risk of inefficiencies and difficulties in managing cash surpluses or overdrafts. Moreover, making cash flow forecasts proved challenging due to the absence of accurate daily balance data. The solution, provided by Finland-based FinanceKey, uses application programming interfaces (APIs) that link directly to the banks, summing up the numbers on a dashboard. Impressed by the concept, Better Energy decided to give it a try. They began implementing the dashboard in November and were using it daily just two months later. Updates are fetched automatically every 15 minutes.

Unifies the dataset

“Another important thing is that FinanceKey collects the data from different banks and creates a unified dataset. This means that no matter which bank’s data we’re looking at, it’s all in the same format. FinanceKey feeds this data into our data warehouse, so we can easily use tools like Power BI to analyse and understand our data,” says Jacob Koch. He hopes participants will take away two important points from his case study. “Using your own data can make a lot of difference in a financial way, because now we basically take better care of our money than we did before. It also changed how we run our department, making it more enjoyable. Now that we don’t need to manually aggregate the data, we have more time to actually think about how we can use the data,” he says.

His second advice: “Keep an eye on start-ups. Some have very clever ideas.”

by Nienke Eusterbrock May 2, 2024, Treasury360.net