Tableau Software, which has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce since August 2019, knows how to make data easy to comprehend. Tens of thousands of businesses around the world use Tableau dashboards to make sense of their financial data. Still, several years ago, the Tableau treasury team struggled to see their own global cash balances and transactions.

"Every day, the controllership would log into various online banking portals and generate statements for the previous day's activity," says Ed Barrie, senior director of treasury. "They would use these statements for manual accounting and reconciliation processes, while the cash application team was manually posting and clearing cash receipts against open customer invoices. We had dozens of bank accounts across several different banks, so this approach was quite inefficient. In addition, the fact that they were always utilizing the previous day's statement meant liquidity and accounting activities were operating on a one-day lag."