Treasury - Banking Integration & Reporting
As transaction volumes grow, especially in B2C (Business to Consumer) or C2B2C (Consumer to Business to Consumer) where the number or small transaction volumes can run into a few thousand transaction a day, the need for banking systems integration and automated reconciliations becomes mandatory rather than good to have.
Many wholesales and retailers now have an online presence and list their products on Amazon, Shopee, Lazada and even their own Brand Online store. These retailers accept a variety of payment methods and have complex transaction flows including refunds, adjustments and claims. Often such companies have to reconcile transactions between their sales portal, the accounting system, the banking transactions and the payment processors. The ability to reconcile the balances and have confidence in the amounts to be collected or paid or determine losses incurred is quite herculean and beyond the ability to perform manually. Computerized reconciliation tools need to be implemented that are able to handle large volumes of data, match successful transactions, list problem transactions as exceptions and have those resolved via manual reconciliation. For these systems to work in sync, some level of systems integration, data feeds, reconciliations, and automation via banking integrations are required. Often the data passed to the bank for each transaction is limited and transactions have to be matched using alternative methods including transactions reference numbers, dates, amounts or a combination of such items.
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Even for non retail customers like trading companies or regular supplier and vendor transactions, payroll transactions, integrations between accounting, payroll and other operations system that touch fund movements or banking need integrations to work successfully. A typical scenario is loading vendor payments into the banking portal or payroll transactions into the banking portal each month. Loading transactions manually run the risk of errors or fraud and are generally not recommended. Having secure transaction files integrated between the transaction systems and the banking platforms allow for secure data interfaces to minimize the risk of incorrect payments.Β
Integrating banking frees up the finance teams to focus on other value added activities like analysis and business partnering instead of spending time reconciling bank transactions.
Banks have been improving their online banking infrastructure and cash management reporting capabilities with investments in online banking, mobile banking, alerts and messaging options. With universal APIs that allow for transactions to be reported on real time or daily basis to even the smallest of accounting software, customers can view their bank balance straight out their accounting systems without the need to log into their banking portals.
Ezee consultants have been closely involved with setting up banking infrastructure for businesses for integrated transaction processing and reporting needs for many years. Besides the obvious treasury benefits integrations enable better control over cash and the ability to generate positive returns on idle cash balances.