Effective cash forecasting is foundational to treasury's core responsibility of cash management. Yet many companies—even large, successful global businesses—still develop cash forecasts via Excel spreadsheets and manual processes. As a result, they lack accuracy and visibility into the organization's future cash flows, which means treasury misses opportunities to reduce borrowing costs and increase investment earnings on excess funds.

All three of this year's Alexander Hamilton Award winners in the category Liquidity Management started in that position. But each of these innovators transformed out-of-date, manual forecasting practices into highly automated processes that generate accurate and granular estimates of future cash flows.