Treasury Workstation Reporting

Free Trials - How we do it

Sujith Nair — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:52:59 GMT

Ideally, you would like to try out the software or application with your data, see if it works for you and then make a purchase decision. We make that option- Free trials of the product - available to any organization that wants to try out our products as well. Over the last few years, many organizations have tried out our products and made purchase decisions after their key users were comfortable with the product features.

Now, more than once we have been asked how we are able to let users try out our products so easily and why deployment of the product for a customer is so quick.

The answer lies in how we built the product, how it is hosted and how the product team has made it easy for us to make an instance available to an organization.

One of my favorite lines when I talk about the product is that "This product was built from the ground up". What that means is that the suite of treasury sciences products were designed and built - every screen, every feature built, every element of the user interface - everything was built by our product team. In other words, no other product or products were modified or customized or tailored to make this suite of products.

Starting from a blank slate gave our product team the opportunity to make the appropriate and best available technology, architecture and design choices for the business problem we were trying to solve. One of the goals we had upfront was to enable organizations to try our product out as easily as possible and adopt very, very quickly. Usability of the product was always critical and was considered every step of the way.

Secondly, everything we offer is web-based. The application is hosted on our datacenter, it can be hosted on the cloud as needed as well.

Finally, I get a notification when an organization registers for a trial and I have one button to click - the system is automatically deployed and emails with credentials are sent out to the organization that registered along with a wizard that helps them get started very very quickly. The product team has set it up such that it is that easy for me to setup an instance for a potential customer. Here is the process in a bit more detail.

Treasury Workstation Reporting

Payments, Positioning & Integration for Hedge Funds - Overview

Sujith Nair — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 06:07:41 GMT

The last 2 posts detailed out various aspects of our implementation for a large hedge fund. Todays post or picture provides an overview of the complete implementation - this picture is an early version of the picture that will appear in a case study of our payments and cash management system implementation for hedge funds. Will post a link to it when available. Meanwhile, here is the overview.

Automated Accounting Treatment, Cash Position, GL Integration, Hedge Fund Treasury, Hedge Fund Treasury Worstation, Multi bank payments, Netted Payments, Payment workflow implementation, Reporting, Straight Through Processing, Treasury Management , Treasury Reporting, Treasury Workstation, Treasury Workstation Reporting

Treasury Workstation Features - Your Enterprise's Global Cash Position

Sujith Nair — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:19:29 GMT

Today's post addresses what your enterprises global position would look like within our cash management operations module. Assuming that you have multiple banks that you work with (I have created four here) and say you position in multiple currencies, central cash management organization users will of course be able to see individual positions submitted for each currency.

The global position report enhances the enterprise wide view by providing a consolidated position across subsidiaries, currencies, banks and accounts.

Say we run the report for today. The system shows you the high level information upfront - i.e your total position across subsidiaries, currencies and all accounts at this point in time in your base currency - here USD is set as the base currency.

Below, the rolled up top level position, you would see the details- first data from day to day operations accounts grouped by currencies. Within each currency, you will be able to drill down to see the banks, the major transaction group (flow codes with CMO) totals and you will be able to view these in either the base currency or the transaction currency.

The third part of the global position report would show you your investment activity for the day. Data from operations plus data from investments would provide you with your consolidated top-level cash position.

So there you have it. Your top level enterprise wide position and drill downs by currency and banks to view details across operations and investments. Thank you for reading.

Cash Position, Hedge Fund Treasury Worstation, Reporting, Treasury Management , Treasury Reporting, Treasury Workstation, Treasury Workstation Reporting

Treasury Workstation Features (CMO) - Ad Hoc Reporting - Part III (Scheduling Reports)

Sujith Nair — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:10:20 GMT

In my last 2 posts on our Ad Hoc reporting capability, I have covered most of the key features of ad hoc reporting. You can read about those here and here. Today, we will look at another key product feature. The ability to schedule reports and export data into MS Excel and PDF formats. So, the report we created earlier is listed on the Ad Hoc reporting dashboard and on clicking the schedule button, on the right bottom corner of the picture below you can schedule that report.

Any available, already created schedules for the report will be listed, there are none here yet and you can click on add to create your first schedule.

To highlight a key strength of scheduling I wii go ahead and edit one of the conditions in the report we created earlier. Instead of asking the users to input one flow code (such as say ACHD for ACH Debit), we will let users input more than one Flow Code. To do that, I will go back to the dashboard and edit the report, delete the condition that says FlowCode = ? and add a new one as shown below. I will then prompt the end user executing the report enter the conditions at runtime.

Once the changes are made, the conditions selected for the report will be as shown below.

Now we will schedule this report. Note that on clicking add,the user is prompted to enter scheduling information. End users with appropriate privileges can schedule reports to be delivered via email to inbox of selected users or even deliver it to a folder in the network. You also have the option to choose whether to create the report in MS Excel or PDF and you can also password protect it. You can also specify the scheduled time for the report to be executed. You can also choose users within the system and any external users (you can choose not to as well) to receive the reports on the schedule created.

The final, yet most interesting point is that users are also prompted to enter any runtime conditional information while creating the automated schedule as well. For instance, if your A/P organization wants to look at all outgoing payments for the day you could add a schedule (as shown below) for a daily report run at 3 PM each day that reports on ACHD and WOD, WOI - assuming you do ACH debits, and Wires out International and Domestic.

Note that you can schedule the same report as many times as you want. For example, say your receivables department wants to review the list of al Lock Box Deposits at the end of the day we can add another schedule that with FLowCode = LBDEP, as shown below and schedule it to be delivered to the receivables users.

Trust that provides a detailed review of the ad hoc reporting functionality. Note that while we originally built the ad hoc reporting module to be part of CMO, we are now making it available as part of all treasury sciences product modules. As a final note, you can export any report from the system- just execute the report and click export to excel or pdf or schedule the report to be delivered to you in the format you choose. Thank you for reading.

Ad Hoc Reporting, Reporting, Treasury Management , Treasury Management System , Treasury Reporting, Treasury Workstation Reporting

Treasury Workstation Feature (CMO) - Ad Hoc Reporting - Part II

Sujith Nair — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:29:25 GMT

In the last post, we created a conditional ad hoc report. If you have not read that post yet, please read it here. The newly created report appears in the reporting dashboard for users to invoke it. Users with appropriate permissions can edit the report, copy and create a similar report,schedule the report to be delivered via email and of course delete the report.

Today, we will look at additional capabilities of ad hoc reporting. So, you edit this report and navigate to the wizard again. On the main page of the ad hoc reporting wizard, you have a button for configuring display details.

Clicking this button you can configure display details of the report - provide your own field names, specify formatting, apply sums and averages (see below). In a later version, we will let you input your own formula and create calculated fields as well.

Additionally, you could also choose fonts, colors and attach logos to the report as well - see screen below.

Finally, you have the ability to further improve your report by sorting on as many fields as needed, group by multiple fields and total numeric fields. Flow codes within the system identify +ve and -ve transactions and thus you can be rest assured that your sub and grand totals are accurate. See example of sorting and grouping below.

Thus we have created an ad hoc report that reports on current day transactions, sorted by account number and transaction code, grouped and totaled by flow code and with summations on amount. In the next post we will run the report, export it and see how to schedule reports using the ad hoc reporting tool.

Thank you for reading so far, do let me know should you have any questions or comments - especially if you have recommendations on how to improve our ad hoc reporting tool.

Ad Hoc Reporting, Reporting, Treasury Management System , Treasury Reporting, Treasury Workstation, Treasury Workstation Reporting

Treasury Workstation Features (CMO) - Ad Hoc Reporting - Part I

Sujith Nair — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:25:34 GMT

For the next several weeks, I will be focussing on multiple features of our product suite. Today, I will take a look at our ad hoc reporting capability.

A while ago, I had covered how our ad hoc reporting capability came about in a post- you can read about it here. In this post, we will highlight key capabilities of our reporting module. In short, the TS reporting module allows end users to create conditional reports, save them, export reported data into MS Excel or PDF and schedule reports to be delivered either to a network folder or your email inbox.

To start creating a report, you would select a view from the available list of views. Views are essentially groups of fields from your database that you can select to include in your report - for the technically minded this is really a database view - a view that exposes selected fields from multiple tables. Now here is why we use views- its is simpler for end users to use and quick enough (a day's turn around) for our product team to create it. We also have most of the views that you would need already in there.

For this report, I have selected the "Current Day Transactions" view and choose a few fields from the list of Available fields for this new report. Now, I have added 2 conditions setting the as of date to the current day (the day an end user runs this report) and have asked the system to prompt the use for the flow code (i.e. the type of transaction you are looking for - for example ACHD for and ACH Debit). I clicked on the conditions link (can use the +,- links to add and remove conditions), the pop up below shows the ability to add multiple conditions and either provide values for these conditions or prompt users to enter the values at runtime.

Now, you can preview and save to create an ad hoc report that reports on transactions for the current day for the transaction types that you choose at runtime. This report can be made available to either yourself or other users based on the permissions you have and based on the features available below.

So, we have created a quick conditional ad hoc report and shared it with our users. In the next post, we will discuss some of the more advanced features of ad hoc reporting.

Ad Hoc Reporting, Reporting, Treasury Management System , Treasury Reporting, Treasury Workstation Reporting

Treasury Workstation Reporting Capabilities - Our Story

Sujith Nair — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:56:09 GMT

After a recent presentation we did at TMAC, I had the opportunity to speak with someone who had just implemented a web based Treasury Workstation. He was happy with how things were except for the lack of effective ad hoc reporting functionality (the functionality was there but not all data could be reported on). He also mentioned that he liked how we did reporting and had some questions regarding that. Had a product evaluation been available, this customer may have been able to make a more informed decision. However, That made me think of our story again, as in how our ad hoc reporting functionality came into existence. Let me start by referring to a previous post on treasury workstation reporting capabilities here. In that post I was discussing the cost benefits of utilizing a consolidated reporting solution. Now, here is how I describe our Ad Hoc reporting capabilities

Ad Hoc Reporting enables customers to report on any piece of information stored within the system, provided the user who runs the report has access to the data. Yes, you can choose your fields, add multiple conditions, save it, share it and export the data. Users can perform all of these tasks by watching a 5 minute video.

The above sentence pretty much describes our capabilities with reporting at a high level. In this post, I will discuss how our Ad Hoc reporting capabilities came about and how we ensure that the above mentioned features are met successfully. It all started with a need, the need for a first large implementation of our product at a large customer. The cash manager told us that (I almost remember this quote verbatim)

"Well, we have 90 reports that are there in our current systems, I am not sure how many our users use but there are 90 in total. We can try to eliminate the number of reports by speaking to various users but then again, we cannot be quite certain".

Note that we are a mid sized company and access to a large number of developers is not always easily available. We have our constraints and that in some ways promote creative efficiencies within our software development teams. To answer the need of our customer, our product architects decided that we should build an ad hoc reporting tool. That way, we did not have to create a multitude of reports and users could create reports to users themselves. Our development team would not have to create any more reports, ever again.

Currently, we have customers trying out our product online, we are doing multiple presentations and demonstrations of the product and almost every time we are told that our ad hoc reporting capabilities are excellent, the best in class. So, thanks to a need from our customer, our constraints and most importantly sound decisions made by our product architects. A need and a challenge has resulted in an asset. You can read more about our software development thoughts and other products on our parent company blog and directly from a product architect of ours here and on his personal blog here.

Treasury Workstation Reporting

Reducing bank reporting costs...

Sujith Nair — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:47:45 GMT

I have to say that this post is a no brainer. It is not a brilliant idea or something that would require a process improvement consultant. However, it is something that a lot of us miss somewhere along the way. Even if we realize it; we may consider it not very significant and/or our technology solution may not be sophisticated enough to handle it.

Let us look at a simple, yet very common scenario. Jill, A user at a subsidiary of yours needs information on a certain transaction. How does she get it? She goes to the respective bank website and downloads a report that contains the details of that transaction. She has the information she needs and you don't even know about it. Yes, if you were to look at monthly bank costs, you would see a small insignificant payment for the information that was downloaded. One among the many other such small insignificant payments that you make to the bank.

Now, consider this. You have already downloaded the information Jill wanted earlier. The details of that transaction was available to you via the prior day and current day files that you had received from the bank earlier. Would it not be better had you shared this information with Jill? If so, you would have saved on the small cost you paid for that transaction. And many other similar transactions. The solution as I mentioned upfront is simple. Have one consolidated data warehouse of all transactions from all the banks that you have relationships with and enable your users access to this database via a web-based interface.

This scenario played out almost exactly as I described above for one of our customers. They had adopted our enterprise reporting module is saving anywhere between 10-15k USD a month, by just having our reporting module be the one front end for all its reporting users, all over the world. Again, no one could predict that the saving will be this high as there were so many different reports being generated from multiple banks at multiple locations. Once the solution was implemented, the cost benefit was clear.

Have you looked at your bank reporting costs lately? Are you paying the bank multiple times over for the same information? There may be room for improvement, just by consolidation of data and having all your users access it from your new enterprise data warehouse.