Written out in full
How to bring a group onto one treasury system, and how to consolidate its cash.
Two guides, complete on this page. Each stage names what has to be true before the next one starts, and each one ends in a test you can run yourself. There is nothing here to request and no summary standing in for a document.
Guide one
How do you bring a multi-entity group onto one treasury system?
In stages, and a stage is finished when something specific is true rather than when a date arrives. The five below are in the order they have to hold, because each one is what makes the next one checkable.
- 01Close the account inventory
Every account the group holds on one list, including the ones nobody has looked at since they were opened. Each one names the company that owns it, the bank it sits at and the ledger account it is booked to. This is the stage that gets rushed, and it is the only one whose omissions stay invisible afterward.
The check
Every bank account on the list has a ledger account behind it, and every bank account in the ledger has a statement source in front of it. Nothing on either side without a pair.
- 02Let the statements arrive on their own
Each bank sends what it already sends, in the format it already sends it. A profile describes that file once, and the same layout lands every time it arrives. Nobody re-keys anything and nobody downloads anything to start the day.
The check
A full day arrives with nobody touching it, and each account’s opening balance equals its own previous closing balance. A day that never arrived shows up as a missing day rather than as a smaller one.
- 03Send the ledger extract whole
The document number, the posting date, the clearing document, the debit and credit indicator, the amount in the document’s currency and in the company’s, the assignment and the reference. Send every column the export writes: the fields nobody asks for in March are the fields the question arrives about in November.
The check
Rows delivered equals rows landed plus rows rejected, exactly, and each rejected row names the field that stopped it. A short delivery has to announce itself instead of looking complete.
- 04Reconcile a month nobody is arguing about
One company, one account, a closed month. The differences that come out are the group’s real ones, and they are far more useful than a demonstration on invented figures, because somebody in the room already knows what two of them are.
The check
Every difference has a name and what is left without one is zero. A residual nobody can take apart is the finding, not a rounding matter.
- 05Write down who is allowed to approve what
Who approves a correction, who approves a payment, what one person can do alone and what needs a second name. Settle this before anything is instructed anywhere, not after the first run.
The check
Somebody who is not allowed to approve tries to, and cannot. That is the only version of this check worth running.
Stage one. An account nobody remembered is not a small omission — it is a group position that is quietly short, and it surfaces months later as a difference nobody can trace to anything. Close the inventory before a single file is connected.
A stage is finished when its check passes, and a stage that passes its check does not come back.
Guide two
How do you consolidate the group’s cash into one figure?
You add the balances. Everything below is about what that addition is allowed to contain, and about whether somebody else can reproduce it.
- 01Say what the population is before adding anything
- Every account of every company in scope, and the companies that are not in scope named out loud rather than left out quietly. Balances and deposits are two lines: money in an account and money that cannot be spent this afternoon are not the same thing, and a total that merges them is a number nobody can act on.
- 02Fix one moment for the whole group
- A position read at four different moments is not a position. One stamp for every figure under it, and the stamp carries its zone: a time with nothing after it is ambiguous by several hours across the cities a group like this banks in.
- 03Convert at one published rate per pair, and print the rate
- A rate is a figure, so it travels with its unit. The number on its own could be pesos per euro or euros per peso, and those are two very different amounts. Print the pair, print the moment it was published, and the group figure stops being something the reader has to take on trust.
- 04A pair with no published rate leaves the total
- Not the previous day’s rate, not one borrowed from a neighboring date, not a triangulation through a third currency. The row is declined where the amount would have been, and the total says how many currencies it covers, so four of five can never be read as five.
- 05Do not call it consolidated while something is still left to eliminate
- Cash sitting at external banks has nothing to eliminate, so adding it up is a consolidation. A figure that also contains what one of your companies owes another is the group position, and it stays the group position until those two entries come out of it.
- 06Hand it to somebody who did not build it
- The last check is not arithmetic. Give a second person the local amounts, the rates and the stamp, and see whether they land on the same number. If they can, it is a figure. If they cannot, it is an opinion with decimals on it.
Balance, in its own currency
MXN 39,104,220
Mexico
- Rate, as published
- 19.5313 MXN/EUR
- Published at
- Aug 14, 2026, 08:00 GMT+2
In the group currencyEUR 2,002,130.94
None of those six steps is about software. They are what makes a number defensible — and they are why the position prints the rate and the stamp beside the figure rather than somewhere underneath it.
What both guides share
What makes a treasury figure defensible?
Every step above ends the same way: in something a second person can run to get the same answer. Four properties come out of that, and they are the same four whether the figure is one account or the whole group.
- It traces to a record
- Every figure goes back to the line, the document or the file it came from, in one move rather than through a spreadsheet somebody rebuilt. A figure you cannot trace is a figure you cannot defend, whatever it says.
- It states its population
- Read the label word by word: every qualifier in it has to exist in the data. A total over four of five currencies presented as all five is exact arithmetic under a false label, and the arithmetic is not the part that failed.
- Incomplete is said out loud
- Where something is missing, the surface says which and why, in front of the reader rather than in a note nobody opens. Quietly partial is the one state that costs more than being wrong.
- A refusal is a result
- No published rate, no evidence, two candidates: the honest answer is the named refusal, and it arrives with what was tried. A number always appearing is not the same as a number always being there.
That is the whole of it. Everything else in both guides is the order you do things in.
Where the steps happen
Where does each of these steps happen in the product?
The inventory and the statement sources sit in one place, the ledger extract in another, and the consolidated figure in a third. These are the pages that describe each of them.
The modules the steps run in
- Bank connectivity SWIFT, EBICS, host-to-host and API — however your banks send.
- ERP integrations SAP, Oracle, Dynamics and Navision, read rather than replaced.
- Reconciliation Bank against ledger, with the evidence for every match.
- Cash position Group, country, entity — the same figure at any level.
- Intercompany Both legs of every internal movement, netted and explained.
Before the first file
What teams ask before they start
- 01Do we have to change our ERP, or ask our banks for a new format?
- No. A profile describes the file you already receive, once, and the same layout lands every time that file arrives. An export your team already produces for a bank or for an auditor is a good place to start, and a bank that changes its layout is a change to the profile rather than to anything on your side.
- 02Which company should go first?
- The one whose accounts you can inventory completely today. Scope is a subset by design: the companies outside it stay a named state on every screen instead of an empty cell, so starting narrow never quietly hides what is not in yet.
- 03Two of our banks send the same account in different formats. Does that break anything?
- No. A profile belongs to a file rather than to an account, so each file keeps its own layout and both land in the same shape. The account is one account, with one balance and one history behind it.
- 04Who has to be involved on our side?
- Whoever can produce the two extracts, and whoever can say who approves what. That is the honest list. Neither guide asks for a change inside your ERP or for software on your own machines.
- 05What if a currency has no published rate on the day we close?
- That row is declined and the total says how many currencies it covers. Nothing downstream inherits a rate that does not exist — not a report, not a forecast, not a board pack — because the figure that would have carried it is the one refusing to be stated.
Run guide two on your own month.
Bring the closing balances of one month for every account in one company, and the rates your group actually uses. We build the consolidated figure with you and print the rate and the stamp beside every row of it.
Nothing has to be connected to a bank to do it, and the working is yours to keep.