Manual vs automated bank fee statement review

It may not seem like much, but manually reviewing paper account analysis fee statements or manually re-keying fee data to a spreadsheet for analysis costs more than just time. Such reviews add little value and can cost you significantly in simple human error. Just ask the team or person responsible for reviewing these statements what it really takes to go through them, line-by-line, dollar by dollar to catch errors — for every banking relationship your company maintains and within a set period of time.

It is not unusual for a bank to send a 30 or 60 plus page statement each month. If you are doing this process manually, that means reviewing this statement AND manually entering it into a spreadsheet, both of which are subject to human error. You may have someone dedicated to this role or it may be a part of someone's job, but either way this manual process means there are other, more important tasks that aren't being completed or you have to maintain a higher head count just because of this one task that has to be done for each and every bank relationship, every month. Add to that the fact that if you aren't able to put the appropriate time to the review because of other more critical tasks that need attention, the likelihood is greater that something will be missed or incorrectly entered because of the sheer volume of lines that have to be reviewed and keyed.

The cost of missing statement errors

Many agreements require corporations to report fee statement and pricing errors within a specified period of time or they are deemed accepted. With small treasury groups and the size of large corporate analysis statements, some treasury groups won't even look at an analysis statement within that time period, which means they will fall outside the required time period to report inconsistencies. This isn't a fault of the treasury group, more the reality of what happens among the many responsibilities the treasury group carries, often with a limited number of people.

While this might not seem like a serious problem, it's actually one that can cost your company tens of thousands of dollars each year — and often a lot more — particularly when you multiply these deadlines by the number of bank relationships you have to manage on a monthly basis.

If you miss a deadline, you can always try to negotiate with the bank. But that then costs you time to do so and what could easily have been captured in an automated system and dealt with quickly on an exception basis, now becomes an even more cumbersome process in which someone has to personally engage and negotiate to get the issue resolved.

This type of time draining activity also takes away from the true analysis your treasury group could perform with better, automated data that would provide your business with greater insight into activity trends, payments and receivables, and relationship pricing, just to name a few things, all of which can add greater value to the business.

Increasing your edge with automated bank fee analysis

While in-depth reviews of bank fee statements can save you money by finding things like overcharges or discrepancies in volumes processed, it's the analysis of bank fees that can drive your savings even further in automated bank account management. With automated bank fee analysis, you can more effectively compare services and banks while also gaining greater insight into your service usage so that you have a deeper and more clear-cut understanding of where your dollars are going — and where savings can be gained.

This greater transparency in treasury allows corporate treasuries to analyze the complete cash flow cycle, giving them the information needed to better negotiate and manage fees, optimize account structures, and model scenarios more effectively to drive deeper costs savings.

Gaining global visibility: advantages of integration

The demand for global visibility is not new; it's a requirement most companies wrestle with on a regular basis and remain challenged by in terms of successfully mastering. And it is just one of the places an automated bank account management system delivers on the promise of global visibility when it is integrated into your treasury system.

With an integrated bank management system, you can easily gain visibility into business trends and changes in activity, allowing you to do things like easily identify months of high payment activity vs low payment activity; analyze and compare how you are sending and receiving payments so that you can more easily compare things like the number of checks deposited to ACH items received to incoming wires; and more easily gain a consolidated, global view of your relationship pricing so that you can more readily identify changes in pricing and/or account structures so you can better set acceptable thresholds for activity types.

With a standalone system, it's likely that someone, who is not doing the daily cash processing, brings in the data and does the analysis or they have to create reports to send to others to review. If the reports are reviewed by individuals who do not do the day-to -day work, then that individual may not know when processes and/or services change. In this situation, for example, a fee may continue to be paid because it stays within overall tolerance even though the service was terminated. That could also be an issue if activity slowly changes. By contrast, an integrated solution allows the person doing the day-to-day work to directly review accounts they are familiar with without having to depend on someone else to send them a report. This reduces manual intervention or excess time spent working across functional areas of responsibility and can provide you with that global visibility you may be lacking today, all of which can result in not only operational efficiencies but cost savings.

A quick review for significant cost savings

By looking at even just a few of these routine tasks performed in managing your bank account relationships, it is easy to see where manual processes could be costing you a great deal more than they need to. An automated bank account management system gives you the control, visibility and negotiating power — all in a centralized repository of integrated data — that can help you drive effective change that can quickly improve your bottom line performance.