A cash position is the cash you have/don't have or expect to have/not have across your banks at a given moment in time. You create one or multiple positions during a day, multiple if you have considerable current day fluctuation in cash and make short term investment decisions based on it. All treasury management systems or workstations should let you do that - i.e create multiple positions during the day.
During our early days at Treasury Sciences (some 3 years ago now) while responding to one of those lengthy RFP's ; we responded to a series of questions on cash positioning. The reason I recall this particular RFP is because the questions were vague. They asked if the vendor's system could create cash positions, if the system could position by currency, by country, by subsidiaries and finally by departments within subsidiaries. These were followed by a series of questions on how much effort was needed for each and so on. Well, they may not have known what they wanted when they wrote the RFP.
Since this RFP, we have met with multiple organizations who needed some combination of the above mentioned cash positioning groups (It be noted that we are yet to meet anyone who has all of the above needs). For example, some organizations would want their subsidiaries to position for themselves across currencies with the ability for central treasury/management to view the global enterprise position.
Our product team went to work and came up with a solution - TAGS.
Tags are generic, yet a very effective solution that has been used by web based applications for a while now. So, we let end users (mostly administrators) create TAG's within TS CMO. Customers can call the tag what they want (typically named a Subsidiary or a Region or a Department or something that is meaningful to the organization) and create as many tags as needed. Then administrators assign accounts and users to these tags. The system ensures that users assigned to a certain tag work within the confines of the tag- i.e they can work with only those accounts that are associated with the tag.
Within tags, users have the ability to create positions in multiple currencies- the only restriction being the accounts that they have access to based on the tags they are associated to. Finally, there is the global enterprise position - the ability for central treasury or management to view the enterprise position across currencies and tags.
From a security perspective, roles still exist and overlap with tags. For example, a user with view only access based on her role would be able view data in the accounts that she has access to based on the tag she is associated with.
We think that use of TAGS is the most effective way of providing a large organization with flexible cash positioning capabilities - end user driven, flexible, easy to manage and secure. And it just takes several minutes for an administrator to setup or change using a web browser.
Do let me know if you have questions, especially if you have similar needs and have alternate solutions to this problem.