We've been looking at the treasury space for more than a couple of years now and turns out, there is very little free goodness available out there. Most products seem fairly closed. Ranging from their features, to their screens, to their pricing - most companies out there seem fairly reluctant to discuss anything openly.
What is even more discouraging is that unless you buy a treasury workstation from a specific vendor, there is very little value that vendor can add to your life as a cash analyst or a treasurer.
In my previous post we announced the free BAI to Excel service. Making the BAI to Excel service free was our humble humble attempt to make a small dent in the universe of treasury workstations and add a little bit of value to your life as a treasurer even if you do not need a professional solution like CMO.
A few folks have signed up for the service and have been trying it out. We have been talking to a few of those Beta signups and have been learning about how they would like to use the BAI to Excel service.
Most organizations out there who are using this service because they want to quickly scan BAI files during the course of the day and see what the files contain. Obviously, it makes sense to see a corresponding excel version rather than a cryptic BAI file. For them, the BAI to Excel service through it's user interface works just fine.
If your organization falls in this category and this is how you are (or plan on) using the BAI To Excel Service, the rest of this post may not apply to you.
A few other organizations however, have decided to be a little more adventurous with the service and have plans of using it programmatically so that they can automate the translation from BAI to Excel by building their own custom scripts and tools around this service.
We have been getting requests to make the BAI to excel service available programmatically primarily from folks who have in-house development teams and want to build small scripts or custom tools around this service. Classic cases that we have seen so far include:
- Teams who want to write a script which automatically downloads the BAI files, converts them to excel, zips the excel files up and sends them to the cash analyst every morning without needing any user intervention. The befit of this of course is that the cash analyst gets a consolidated zip containing human readable excel files every morning.
- Teams who want to write scripts that get BAI files, convert them to excel and post these excel files on their banking services intranet websites. Benefit is having human readable excel reports on your intranet site instead of going to the bank site manually and trying to read cryptic BAI files.
- Teams who want to build small desktop based tools which access this service programmatically.
We have decided to listen to the folks who have been giving us feedback and have decided to open up the BAI to Excel API so that you can do all of the above with your own in-house development team.
As of today, we are exposing the BAI to Excel API as a public, secured web service that anyone who signs up for the free BAI to Excel account can consume using his custom code or scripts.
Going ahead, we will be working on building some sample tools around this web service to demonstrate how you can build your scripts and tools around this service. In this post however, let's just go ahead and talk about how you can activate this service so that you can consume it using your own code or scripts.
To activate the service for programmatic access you will need to go through the standard registration process, which is completely free. Once registered and logged in to the BAI to Excel web application; start by clicking on the web service access hyperlink available in the header.
Once in this screen you should be able to activate web service access to the BAI to Excel service by clicking the enable button.
Clicking on the enable button should generate a security key for you:
This should also give you access to view the web-service WSDL specification. You can use the "click here" link to see the web service WSDL which contains the specifications you will need to consume the web-service programmatically. The web service requires that you pass the security key each time you call it programmatically.
We use the security key along with your user name to identify the request as a request coming from a valid user. Security keys are as confidential as passwords and should not be shared and distributed.
With your username and security key you can consume the web service based API, send your BAI files to the web service and get an excel file back using your custom code or scripts.
We are hoping that this will open up a whole lot of possibilities for folks who do not need a full blown treasury workstation yet and are just trying to build small tools or custom applications around BAI files.
Going forward we will be building additional tools and services around the API and will be giving you examples of how you can consume the API and do custom development using the API.
All of these sample tools that we build on this service will be released free of charge.
The underlying service, as usual, is also going to be free as well.
More free goodness to be announced soon.
Stay tuned.
We love hearing from you. If you like our services, please do continue to use them and spread the word.
We would also love to hear how you are using our free services.
Your feedback gives us an opportunity to improve the services based on your feedback.
If you are facing problems with services, please do let us know.
We would love to help.
As always, Ideas, thoughts, suggestions are always welcome.
Feel free to reach out to me at rajiv@treasurysciences.com.