Five practical moves for a treasury team right now

You do not need a new platform to make your treasury function meaningfully better in twelve weeks. Here are five moves any mid-market treasury team can make this quarter. None of them require new software. Most of them are uncomfortable. All of them pay back inside a year.

One. Audit your supplier bank account file

Pick the fifty highest-spend suppliers. For each one, confirm that the bank account on file matches the bank account the supplier expects to be paid into, by sending the supplier a one-line email that asks them to confirm. Not a form. A one-line email from a real person.

You will be surprised how many do not match. The mismatches are split between innocent (the supplier changed banks and forgot to tell you) and serious (someone substituted an account in your system without authorisation). Both are worth catching before the next payment run.

This is a two week exercise. It costs nothing. It is the single highest-impact thing you can do.

Two. Tighten the cash forecast cadence

Most mid-market treasury teams refresh the cash forecast weekly. Tighten it to daily for the next ninety days. Not as a process change for the rest of time. As a temporary discipline that will reveal where your forecast is least accurate.

By the end of the ninety days you will know the two or three line items that are wobbling the most. Those line items are the work. Fix them. Then drop back to weekly cadence.

This is the discipline equivalent of weighing yourself every day for a month. Painful in the moment, useful in the data it produces.

Three. Set up a two-eyes review on new supplier bank accounts

You probably have one-person authority on adding a new bank account to a supplier record. Make it two. The buyer who set up the supplier and the treasurer or treasury operator who reviews payments. Both have to sign off before the account becomes payable.

This is a workflow change. It costs one to two days of meeting time to set up. It removes the most common single-point-of-failure in supplier fraud. The number of incidents you will prevent is not zero, even at mid-market scale.

Four. Reconcile against the bank statement, not the AP ledger

Most teams reconcile the AP ledger against itself. Sales were these, payments were these, balances are these. The reconciliation that matters is the AP ledger against the bank statement. The bank knows what actually went out. The AP system knows what was approved to go out. The delta between them is the fraud risk, the timing slop, and the master data drift, all in one number.

Look at the delta every month. Even rough numbers help. The treasurer who knows the bank-versus-AP delta to within a few thousand has a category of problems she can talk to her CFO about. The treasurer who does not is operating without that signal.

Five. Write down the unwritten exceptions

Every AP function has a folder of unwritten exceptions. Suppliers who are paid early because they always have been. Suppliers who get net 60 even though the contract said net 30. Approvers who are "always in copy" on certain categories. None of this is in any system. All of it is in your AP lead's head.

Write it down. Not as a formal policy. As a list. The act of writing it down forces a conversation about which exceptions are legitimate and which are unsanctioned drift. The list becomes either the documentation you should have had, or the working set of things to clean up. Either is useful.

Why I am writing this

Because none of these moves require Calabash. They will all make your function better regardless of what software you eventually choose. And because the teams who do these things are also the teams we want to be working with when they are ready to choose software. A good operating function makes everyone's implementation easier, including ours.

If you do any of the five, I would like to hear how it went. Sign up at calabash.app/b2b and tell us which one moved the most.