Half the treasury conversations I have about Calabash end up on bank account verification. Every treasurer I have spoken to has a story. The cost of one incident is so much larger than the cost of doing the verification properly upfront that the math is not even close.
You do not need a new platform to make your treasury function meaningfully better in twelve weeks. Five moves any mid-market team can take this quarter. None require new software. Most are uncomfortable. All pay back inside a year.
A CFO asked me to send him a comparison of treasury platforms. I had to disappoint him. The comparisons people put on the internet are bad. They are bad because they list features. Features are the wrong thing to compare. The right questions are.
A hundred and forty active suppliers is a category management problem whether you call it that or not. The procurement function names it one way, the AP function names it another, the treasury function names it a third. All three are talking about the same thing.
A vendor pitch opened with AI-powered treasury intelligence. The actual product was a dashboard with five filters. The treasurer next to me audibly sighed. There is a real conversation to be had here. It is just not the one most vendors are having.
Every conversation about smarter AP turns into a feature list. The list is real but it is the wrong frame. The features come second. The primitives come first. Four primitives, in order of importance, with the reasoning behind each one.
A finance director's AP team had a twenty seven day lag from invoice receipt to payment cleared. Industry median for her size was fourteen. No single step looked slow. Every handoff was a day. A note on where automation actually helps.
A CFO described his AP function as fine. AP cost was four percent of revenue. He had not measured it. The number was high for four reasons, all invisible from the org chart. A note on the costs that hide inside healthy-looking AP.
Twenty six days a year. That is how much senior treasurer time a mid-market AP function loses to contract terms that have drifted across three systems. The hours are invisible until someone gets paid wrong. Why we made the boring choice.
A treasurer carrying two point one million in unreconciled cash every Monday morning is not unusual at mid-market scale. The number rarely comes from treasury. It comes from procurement. A note on why we built Calabash buyer-side first.