A reliable cash status starts with the database

How much liquidity is actually available today? If you can’t answer this question within minutes, you don’t have a management problem – you have a data problem. Part 2 of our “Treasury Engineers” series on the foundation of all liquidity planning.

In many companies, answering the simplest treasury question is surprisingly time-consuming. Account balances are in the banking portal, open items are in the ERP system, figures from subsidiaries are in separate systems, and the rest is in a spreadsheet that someone updates manually every morning. By the time all this is consolidated into a complete picture, it’s already afternoon – and the data is from this morning.

There’s no way to get an accurate picture of liquidity without a comprehensive database. This is achieved when the relevant sources converge: the ERP system with its open items, the Treasury Management System (TMS) with financial transactions and hedges, and the banks with actual account movements. Only when these systems interact in real time does a cash status emerge that is current enough to act upon.

It’s Worth Taking a Look at the System Architecture

Data consolidation is rarely a purely treasury issue. It affects the group-wide system architecture: Which company posts to which system, which bank accounts are managed through which channels, and where do media breaks occur? A look at this map reveals where a technical foundation for consolidation must be established before new reports or forecasts can be considered.

The effort pays off in two ways. First, it eliminates the manual data collection work that currently ties up resources and introduces errors. Second, the database becomes robust enough to automate processes – from currency hedging to bank transfers.

Data Becomes a Status

This is exactly where BDF EXPERTS’ Cash Position Cockpit (CPC) comes in. It consolidates cash-related data within SAP and provides a transparent overview of cash positions – across accounts, banks, and companies – without the need for downstream spreadsheets. What the Treasury team sees is not a copied-and-pasted interim figure, but the current position.

This foundation is the starting point for everything else. Liquidity planning is only as good as the data on which it is based. And AI-powered analyses that identify deviations and run through scenarios need, more than anything, a clean, consolidated source – otherwise, they’ll produce conclusions that look convincing but are actually flawed.

That’s why the Treasury Engineer doesn’t start with the forecast, but with the foundation. Once the data foundation is in place, the rest follows.

Part 2 of our “Treasury Engineers” series. Based on a guest article by Michael Völkl (Head of Consulting Treasury, BDF EXPERTS) in the trade magazine DerTreasurer, Issue 1/2026.

The text and graphics were created with AI support and reviewed by BDF EXPERTS.