Ever since the financial crisis heightened companies'awareness of the importance of cash flow management, treasuryactivities—and treasury managers—have been inhabiting larger rolesin many organizations. “The focus on cash escalated during thecrisis; everyone was fairly tied up with that particular topic,”says Sherri Liao, practice leader for the enterprise performancemanagement and business intelligence executive advisory program atThe Hackett Group. “Cash is still something that companies arelooking at, especially organizations that have tighter paymentcycles. Also, we're finding that companies making larger capitalinvestments are being pressed to show how they're going to makethose cash outlays and returns on those investments because there'sa heightened sensitivity around risk now.”

The 2014 “Key Issues Study” from The Hackett Group indicates,predictably, that cash is taking a back seat to revenues andprofits. When asked about their company's strategic financialpriorities for 2014, two-thirds of respondents said that growingrevenue is either their number-one or number-two priority. Nearlyas many cited improving margins and profitability as either numberone or number two. Improving cash flow scored quite a bit lower,with only 7 percent citing it as their top priority and 15 percentclaiming it's their second-most-important objective. (See Figure 1,below.)

This doesn't mean, though, that cash management has fallen bythe wayside of the corporate agenda. “As organizations are able toimprove visibility to margin management and product orcustomer/channel profitability, they're going to have more of a wayto link that kind of information to cash flow,” Liao says. “It'sjust that now there's limited visibility into seeing whereperformance is coming from. Once that visibility becomes moretransparent, they're going to be able to make better cash flowanalysis, better leveraged insight into that area to give them lineof sight.”