Being able to accurately forecast cash in both the near and long term requires accurate data and successful integration of systems, people and business processes.
However, a 2016 treasury report from Ovum and Temenos found the lack of real-time data availability was a significant operational issue for more than a third (35%) of all corporates surveyed.
With multiple bank accounts across different countries and currencies, the quest for visibility over cash is one of the treasurer’s key challenges. A critical cash forecast that many companies work from is the immediate on-the-day forecast.
It is common to run several of these with different cut-off times by currency, so GBP comes before USD, for example. The insights of an immediate cash forecast are vital to managing on-the-day cash.
“Our on-the-day forecast is updated a number of times during the day,” says Frances Hinden, vice president treasury operations at Shell International.
“It is partly automated, partly manual, and we are on the journey of automating that further. We will never get fully there because there are always items that come up that do not make it into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in time to make it into the forecast, although people may know that something is coming at the last minute.”
At Shell, there is also a statistical model that sits on top of the immediate forecast for some of the receivables, which uses treasury knowledge of who tends to pay late and who tends to pay early. This extends out up to 20 days.
“It becomes less accurate as you go further out very quickly, as all automated cash forecasts do,” says Hinden. “We put in the big flows manually if we know they are coming, particularly the major treasury flows, such as internal and external dividend payments and big tax payments.
“It is the nature of our business that we have some very large payments, such as taxes and royalties, while individual cargoes of crude oil can also be big payments in and out. When we know of these things, we put them in the forecast. The forecast is linked automatically into our treasury management system (TMS).”
Just knowing where your cash is for immediate needs can be straightforward. Corporate treasurers can get the visibility of all bank balances across their cash management banks in near-real time using standard SWIFT messages and MT 940s, for example.
The importance of an on-the-day cash-flow forecast will usually depend upon the size of a company’s cash and the amount of liquidity it needs
“In many cases, balance reporting and reconciliation can be fairly well automated using SWIFT capabilities,” says Valeriy Zubkov, a treasurer with direct forecasting experience at a FTSE 100 corporate. “It is more difficult for those corporates that are using a variety of proprietary online banking platforms.
“Further complexity may arise where corporates operate a number of different ERPs and you try to consolidate the data in different formats from different systems.”
The importance of an on-the-day cash-flow forecast will usually depend upon the size of a company’s cash and the amount of liquidity it needs.
“At the end of last year, we had $19.1bn of cash on our balance sheet and, as we manage nearly all of this centrally, an end-of-day cash forecast is very important to us, because we do not wish to leave this much on bank accounts,” says Hinden.
“The scale of our cash gives us concerns about counterparty credit risk as well as optimising yield – we don’t leave large sums with our banks overnight because there is a credit risk. We like to have as much of our cash as possible either with highly rated banks or AAA money market funds, or where possible, collateralised via tri-party repos.
“Some companies with a smaller cash balance may not be so worried about that credit risk, but if a bank goes bust and you lose your money, it doesn’t matter what the size of your deposit is. If that was your liquidity, then you have lost it.”
When it comes to longer-term cash-flow forecasting, information may not be as easily sourced from the internal accounting systems as it is for short-term forecasting.
An operating cash-flow forecast relies on the effectiveness of a sales and operations planning cycle, as well as the maturity of internal financial planning and reporting systems within the corporate.
To achieve high forecasting accuracy, treasury needs to work closely with business managers from various departments, such as sales, distribution, supply chain and tax. Treasury also needs a seat at the table in the key operational forums to be able to capture business issues that have potential cash-flow implications.
The operating cash-flow forecast is then over-layered with the financing flows from the treasury management system (TMS), which are fairly certain. If you have maturing deposits with banks, for example, you will know exactly when these flows are expected to occur.
“In a previous treasury role, I worked on a project to implement a system to aid the accuracy of our cash-flow forecasting, particularly in the medium- to longer-term range,” explains Zubkov. “The project was aiming to improve the visibility of cash flows within the organisation and provide a reliable forecast, which is a fundamental input into all treasury decisions on liquidity, funding and FX risk management.”
He adds: “This was a global project – every business unit was required to provide monthly rolling, 24-month multi-currency forecasts of their cash flows from customer collections to supplier payments, salaries and tax, as well as financing flows and dividends. The collection and consolidation of forecasts were enabled by the web-based platform, which was subsequently integrated into the treasury end-to-end IT ecosystem.
“The flexible and easily scalable system is available to users globally and allows reporting and analysis across multiple geographical hierarchies, currencies and flow types.”
In Zubkov’s example, the system outputs are aligned with the company’s hedging policy, meaning that treasury knew exactly which flows to hedge, when to hedge and in which currency.
If interest rates or exchange rates move, then we may have margin calls
At Shell, there is a group process to look at current quarter and current year profit and loss (P&L), cash-flow forecasts, and upcoming year P&L and cash-flow planning.
“We put a treasury view on that in terms of what we know about investment, divestment and revenue phasing, what we know about financing cash flows, such as bond repayments, external dividend payments and debt service, to produce a month-by-month outlook up to the end of the following year,” explains Hinden.
“This is used for longer-term decisions on our financing strategy, such as debt issuance.”
A treasury’s knowledge of trends in big cash flows is essential to a successful long-term forecast. However, some areas are unpredictable. For example, the European Market Infrastructure Regulation reporting has imposed mandatory variation margining on companies with total transactions over a certain value.
Shell is one such company. “All of our derivatives trades are now margined and we will also be hit by initial margin soon. I know some corporates choose to margin all their trades to reduce the potential credit charge and get better pricing,” says Hinden, “but this is a liquidity drain that is unforecastable.
"If interest rates or exchange rates move, then we may have margin calls. Currently, this isn’t a big number because we have only just started margining, but the potential number will grow over the coming years.”
To get the most accurate information possible, it is critical that business units understand the integral role that their reporting plays in the process. With the project that Zubkov worked on, a lot of attention was focused on educating the business managers in the methodology and benefits of the process for the wider organisation.
“There was a big focus from treasury to engage all of the local corporate finance managers through a number of regional workshops, to make sure that they understand how the system and process are intended to work and, importantly, how their reports are used to manage the group’s treasury risks,” says Zubkov.
“The project team also developed a detailed forecasting guide for business managers, and launched an online training course available on-demand through the company intranet. Feedback on their forecasting accuracy is regularly provided to business units so that learnings can be analysed and applied in the next forecasting cycle.”
Since the implementation of a new process and consolidation platform, the quality of cash-flow forecast improved significantly, with a large number of business units consistently reaching over 90% accuracy. This was achieved, to a large degree, due to support from senior finance management across the organisation.
“The drive from treasury and support from senior stakeholders from CFO down to the local FD really helped increase the accuracy across the company,” says Zubkov.
It is important to consider that local finance managers can be conservative when forecasting cash. This is not helpful for the treasurer. “You cannot just think that because they are always conservative that you can add 10% per month, for example,” says Paul Stheeman, an independent treasury consultant and interim treasurer.
“Some finance managers can hide behind things such as budgets and approved expenses, but they don’t really like to use their gut feeling. I push them to use this, as they know the business. If the controller of a business unit knows that there will be a contract signed in two months with payment terms for three months after that, put this in the forecast for five months’ time.”
He adds: “Don’t leave it out because it hasn’t been officially budgeted or forecasted yet. You need the full picture to have the most accurate cash forecast. Getting people out of their comfort zone to do this can be a challenge.”
“One of the things that we generally don’t do a lot of is what you might call medium-term forecasting,” says Hinden. “Historically, we did a month-end forecast, but we don’t do that any more.
“We discovered two things from doing medium-term forecasting. The first is that we rarely made any decisions on the basis of it.
“The second was that, although much of our business was entirely capable of doing an accurate month-end forecast, our trading business could not forecast cash requirements beyond a day or so because they depend so heavily on the oil price and other commodity price movements.”
Companies that are subject to cash margining are likely to maintain larger chunks of short-term liquidity due to large movements in margin calls. This does beg the question as to what the point is of doing an accurate forecast for 95% of the business if 5% of the business is then going to radically alter the actual outcome.
In another scenario, what should you do if your company has a number of bank accounts in different parts of the world that do not sweep to the centre because they are constrained by country-specific regulatory requirements? This is a question that Shell is tackling at the moment.
“We have quite a lot of accounts, particularly local currency accounts, that don’t sweep,” explains Hinden. “We do cash forecasts for them, but some of them have very little movement – our forecasting will be 100% accurate, but how useful is that?
“We may be wasting manpower doing a perfectly accurate forecast when it actually doesn’t matter. So, we are doing a piece of work to look at where we can stop forecasting, and to see if we can use robotics to improve some of the automation to pull data out of systems."
He adds: “We are moving to more automation on everything that is centrally managed and centrally linked to our main ERPs, but we also do cash-flow forecasting for some of our joint ventures. This can be more manual, so what do we need and what can we provide to our joint ventures?”
Paul Stheeman has been an interim treasurer for several years, mainly in the private-equity world where cash forecasting is an important KPI of interest to private investors. Here are his top tips
Generally, what I am looking for is quite similar from company to company. I have seen companies that have some kind of cash-flow forecasting, and there have been others where there has been nothing in place at all. The approach I take is similar in both cases.
I look to engage the local finance managers or those responsible at the subsidiary level as early as possible, as they are the ones that are going to be providing the information for the group treasury function.
Most private-equity-owned companies that I have worked for are required to produce a short-term 13-week forecast in the first place. Most investors are looking to receive this forecast as soon as possible and as accurately as possible. Quite often, these two do not usually go hand in hand.
Preparing a relatively simple Excel spreadsheet for forecasting is a good first step. It makes sense in many cases to move away from Excel to a dedicated forecasting system, but there may not be time to do so immediately.
It is important to engage the local management immediately, but also continuously. Provide regular feedback to those providing the reports. Ask them questions if there is something that does not appear to be clear or understandable at first sight. This can happen quite often.
Ben Poole is a freelance journalist specialising in treasury and transaction banking.
This article was taken from the June 2017 issue of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership