Is cash the same as liquidity?

No. Cash is what sits in a bank account and can be spent today. Total liquidity is balances plus deposits: money the group owns, including the part tied to a maturity date that cannot be spent this afternoon. Undrawn credit is neither — headroom is what you could borrow, not what you hold.

What is the difference between value date and booking date?

The booking date is when the bank posted the line. The value date is when the money starts or stops earning interest, which is when it is really yours. The two disagree often enough that a position built on the wrong one is wrong on exactly the days it matters most.

What is the difference between netting and cash pooling?

Netting works out what companies owe each other and moves only the difference, so it acts on payments before they go out. Pooling is an arrangement with a bank about balances: in a physical pool the balances are swept into one account, and in a notional pool they are read as one and nothing moves. A group can run both at once.

Why can a card settlement never be reconciled against a balance?

Because the credit the acquirer pays you is a net figure and the sales behind it are gross. The fee, the refunds and the chargebacks sit between the two and appear nowhere in your sales records. The only way to reconcile it is to rebuild that deduction until the net equals the credit the bank posted, per provider and per settlement date.

What is intercompany reconciliation?

It is the matching of the two entries that one movement between group companies produces, one in each company’s books, and then the matching of both against the bank transfer that settled them. It is harder than bank reconciliation because the two entries are posted by different teams, on different days and sometimes in different currencies, and the group cannot count the movement twice.

Treasury vocabulary

A glossary where every word is defined against the record it comes from.

Statement lines, value dates, sweeps, headroom, exposure. Each entry says what the thing is, what a system can read out of it, and where in Tresora you look at it. Every definition stands on its own, so you can take one and leave the rest.

The records

What is a statement line, and what is a ledger entry?

Every figure on a treasury screen is built out of two kinds of record: what the bank says happened, and what your own books say happened. Most arguments about a number turn out to be arguments about which of the two is being read.

Statement line: One movement on a bank account, as the bank reported it: an amount, a currency, two dates and whatever text the bank chose to put beside it. It is the bank’s account of what happened, not yours. A statement line exists because the bank booked it, whether or not anything in your own books matches it.
Bank statement format: The file a bank sends its statements in. MT940, CAMT.053, BAI2 and CSB43 are the common ones, and every bank fills them in its own way — the field that carries a counterparty name at one bank carries a fee code at another. Reading a statement means reading that bank’s interpretation of the format, not only the format.
Value date: The day the money is actually yours: the day the bank starts or stops paying interest on it. It is the date the bank stamped on the movement, and it is the date a cash position has to be built on. A credit booked this morning with a value date next week is already in the balance and cannot be spent today.
Booking date: The day the bank posted the movement to the account. It answers a different question from the value date, and the two disagree often enough that a group needs both: the booking date is when the line appeared, the value date is when the money counts.
Ledger entry · journal entry: One movement as your own accounting recorded it: the accounts it hit, the amount, the date it was posted and the document behind it. Every payment, receipt and internal transfer has one. Pairing it with the statement line for the same movement is what reconciliation does.
Settlement: The moment a movement is finished — the money has left one account and arrived in another, and neither side is waiting on the other. An invoice, a transfer or a trade can be agreed, instructed and confirmed and still not be settled. Settlement is the leg that shows up on a bank statement.
Acquirer settlement: The single credit a card acquirer pays you for a batch of sales, after taking its fee and deducting refunds and chargebacks. It never equals the sales behind it, so it can never be reconciled against a balance: the gross sales, the fee and the deductions have to be rebuilt until the net matches the credit the bank actually posted.

Where these records come from

Matching and evidence

What is reconciliation, and what counts as reconciled?

Reconciliation pairs those two records and names whatever has no pair. The words below are the ones that come up when a movement will not pair, which is where most of a controller’s day goes.

Reconciliation: Pairing each bank statement line with the ledger entry that explains it, and naming every line that has no pair. It is finished when every movement on both sides is either matched to its counterpart or carries a reason it is not. Two balances agreeing is not a reconciliation: a bank and a ledger can agree in total and disagree line by line.
Intercompany: A movement between two companies of the same group. Each company books its own side, so one movement produces two entries in two sets of books, and intercompany reconciliation is the work of matching those two entries to each other and then to the bank transfer that settled them. At group level that movement is counted once, never twice.
Counterparty: The other company in a movement: who paid you, or who you paid. The name on a statement line is whatever the bank chose to print, so resolving a counterparty means deciding which party in your own records that string refers to, and keeping the evidence for the decision. A wrong counterparty is worse than an empty one, because it lands in somebody’s payables.
Exception · break: A movement that could not be explained: a statement line with no ledger entry, a ledger entry with no statement line, or two that agree on everything except the amount. An exception is a work item with an owner and a reason rather than an error. Most of them are timing, and they close when the other side arrives.
Approval path · four-eyes: The sequence of people who have to approve a payment before it leaves. Four-eyes means at least two of them, and that whoever created the order is not the person who releases it. The path is your policy: who approves, above which amount, for which entity and out of which account.
Audit trail: The record of how a figure came to be: which records it was built from, which decisions were taken, who took them and when. A trail is worth having only if somebody who was not there can follow it back to the source records and arrive at the same figure.

Your instruction, your accounts

Two of these words describe money leaving. Nothing reaches a bank without the approvals your policy requires, the funds stay in your own accounts, and every approval is recorded under the name of the person who gave it.

Where this work happens

What you hold

What is a treasury position, and how is it different from cash?

A position is a claim about a moment. These words decide what goes into one and what stays out, and the distance between them is usually the distance between what a group holds and what it can actually spend.

Treasury position: What the group holds right now, account by account, in the currency each account is kept in. A position is a statement about a moment, so it carries the moment it was taken and it is only as good as the last statement each bank sent.
Total liquidity: Balances plus deposits — the money the group owns, including the part tied to a maturity date. It is not the same as cash: a term deposit is money you own and cannot spend this afternoon, so folding it into a single cash figure overstates what is spendable today. Undrawn credit sits outside it entirely.
Group position: The same figure read at group level rather than at one entity. Adding up balances is straightforward, because each balance sits with an outside bank and there is nothing between them to remove. Adding up what entities owe each other is not: those receivables and payables have to come out first, or the group counts one movement twice.
Cash flow statement, direct method: A cash flow statement built from the movements themselves — what came in and what went out, by category — rather than worked backward from a profit figure. The direct method needs every movement classified, and that classification is what lets it answer where the money went.
Forecast horizon: How far ahead a forecast runs, and the unit it runs in. In treasury it usually means thirteen weeks. The horizon is where the answer lives: the week the balance is lowest, how far under today it sits, and how long the money above that point is genuinely free.

Where the position is read

Debt and exposure

What is the difference between committed, drawn and available?

A facility, a deposit and an exposure are three different things carrying three different dates. Adding the wrong two of them together is the most common mistake in a debt total.

Committed: The amount a lender has contractually agreed to make available to you, whether or not you have taken any of it. It is a limit rather than money you hold. What is committed and what is drawn are two different figures and they are never added together.
Drawn: The part of a facility you have actually taken and owe. Drawn is debt: it carries interest, it has a repayment date, and it is what belongs in a debt total.
Available · headroom: Committed less drawn — what you could still take under a facility you already have. Headroom is borrowing capacity, not liquidity, so it belongs beside a position rather than inside it.
Maturity: The date an obligation comes due, or the date a deposit is released. A maturity is what turns a total into a calendar: the same amount owed reads very differently when half of it falls inside ninety days.
Exposure: How much a figure would move if something outside your control moved: a currency, an interest rate, one counterparty failing. An exposure is always stated with the thing you are exposed to and the amount at risk. A bare number is not an exposure.
FX rate, and its unit: The price of one currency in another on a given day. A rate means nothing without its pair and its direction: the same number read one way is pesos per euro and read the other way is euros per peso, and only one of the two is the rate you meant. A rate also belongs to a day — the rate on the day the cash actually moved, not a month-end average.

Where the book is kept

Financing and investments Loans, credit lines and the deposits placed beside them — one record.

Inside the group

What is cash pooling, and how is notional different from physical?

Money inside a group moves for reasons that have nothing to do with a supplier being paid. Pooling and netting are the two mechanisms, and they work in opposite directions: one concentrates balances, the other cancels obligations before anything goes out.

Cash pooling: An arrangement with a bank that treats several of a group’s accounts as one for the purposes of interest. There are two kinds and they are not variations of each other: in a physical pool the money moves, and in a notional pool it does not. A group usually runs both, at different banks and in different currencies.
Physical pooling: Balances are swept out of the participating accounts into one header account. The money genuinely leaves each participant, so what left becomes a position between that company and the company holding the header account: a real intercompany balance that both sides book and that earns or costs interest for the days it stands.
Notional pooling: Nothing moves. The bank reads the participating balances as one number and prices interest on that, so an overdrawn account is covered by the others without a cent leaving any of them. Because no transfer happens, no position arises between the participants.
Sweep: The transfer that empties a participating account at cut-off, either to zero or to a target balance it keeps. A sweep is computed on what is genuinely free — the closing balance less anything already approved to leave — and it produces one movement and two entries.
Netting: Working out what a set of companies owe each other and then moving only the difference. Ten invoices between four entities can settle as one transfer, which saves the fees and the days the other nine would have cost. It is an operation on payments, done before anything goes out to a bank, and not a way of presenting two balances as one.

Where the structure is run

Our own labels

Which of these words does Tresora use in its own way?

Three of them, and none is an industry term. Each one is a state the product prints on a screen, so that nobody has to guess what a blank means.

Onboarded scope: The set of companies whose banks and books you have handed over. It is a choice rather than a limit of the system: a group starts with the entities it can hand over now, and everything is complete over that scope from the first morning. Adding one later is a configuration.
Unmanaged: The state a company gets when it appears in your records but sits outside the onboarded scope. Its name is printed, its side of the movement is kept, and it is neither counted as matched nor dropped from a total. It marks a boundary you drew, not a gap in the data.
Unresolved: The state a bank, a bank account or a counterparty gets when the evidence does not identify it. Nothing is guessed: the movement keeps every candidate the evidence named and waits for a person or a later file to settle it. A wrong attribution costs more than an empty one.

Where the market has no word for a state, we print ours and say on the screen what it means. A blank cell is a question; a named state is something somebody can act on.

The ones people ask

The questions behind the definitions

01Is cash the same as liquidity?: No. Cash is what sits in a bank account and can be spent today. Total liquidity is balances plus deposits: money the group owns, including the part tied to a maturity date that cannot be spent this afternoon. Undrawn credit is neither — headroom is what you could borrow, not what you hold.
02What is the difference between value date and booking date?: The booking date is when the bank posted the line. The value date is when the money starts or stops earning interest, which is when it is really yours. The two disagree often enough that a position built on the wrong one is wrong on exactly the days it matters most.
03What is the difference between netting and cash pooling?: Netting works out what companies owe each other and moves only the difference, so it acts on payments before they go out. Pooling is an arrangement with a bank about balances: in a physical pool the balances are swept into one account, and in a notional pool they are read as one and nothing moves. A group can run both at once.
04Why can a card settlement never be reconciled against a balance?: Because the credit the acquirer pays you is a net figure and the sales behind it are gross. The fee, the refunds and the chargebacks sit between the two and appear nowhere in your sales records. The only way to reconcile it is to rebuild that deduction until the net equals the credit the bank posted, per provider and per settlement date.
05What is intercompany reconciliation?: It is the matching of the two entries that one movement between group companies produces, one in each company’s books, and then the matching of both against the bank transfer that settled them. It is harder than bank reconciliation because the two entries are posted by different teams, on different days and sometimes in different currencies, and the group cannot count the movement twice.

See these words on your own figures.

Bring one month of statements and one extract from your ledger. We will show you the same terms on your own records: the lines that matched, the ones that did not, and the reason beside each of them.

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