Cash Visibility: You Can't Manage What You Can't See

A handful of accounts across one or two banks. The information is all there; someone just has to look at it every day and, most importantly, check it against what they expected to see. Reconciling the gap between expected and actual cash is your earliest warning that the forecast is wrong or starting to drift. It costs nothing to track apart from time. Skip the habit and you find out about the problem when a payment bounces.

But a handful of accounts can grow quickly as you scale into new markets, open new entities and add bank relationships. Logging into two portals to check a few accounts is manageable; it becomes a burden fast as counterparties, accounts and currencies multiply.

Multiple entities, multiple banks, multiple currencies, and cash trapped in a subsidiary account nobody looks at between month-ends. Checking balances is time-consuming; consolidating them is real work. Bank statements arrive in different formats at different times, and someone in group finance stitches them together in a spreadsheet that's out of date by Wednesday. FX starts to bite too: are you using consistent rates to convert across accounts, and how often are they refreshed?

Noise also starts to creep in. Small balances held in foreign accounts may not be easy to access, and FX conversion and settlement times have to be factored in before some balances can be used. Cash in a subsidiary simply doesn't have the same liquidity value to the group as reporting-currency cash sitting in the primary entity.

Everything flows into a treasury system automatically, and the risk becomes noise: three hundred accounts reporting daily is only useful if you can cut through what's generated, and someone owns the exceptions.

Many neobanks and start-up-focused institutions have added genuinely useful functionality, giving an aggregated view of current and historical activity across all accounts at that bank. Access often stays with the founder who opened the account — though view-only access for an accountant or fractional CFO is an increasingly common feature that takes the pressure off founders.

Open Banking lets you aggregate account data from a wide range of sources into a single view as you grow. Controlling access to those portals also becomes a bigger concern: who can log in to which account, what permissions they hold, what happens when someone with access leaves, whether anyone else can get in, and how quickly access can be revoked. It's a chore that multiplies as accounts grow, and some platforms make user-rights management far easier than others.

At enterprise level, the MT940 and its successor, the CAMT.053, do the standard work. Direct APIs are faster and increasingly available, though coverage across banks remains patchy. The hard work here is plumbing everything together and keeping track of new accounts; a consolidation exercise to close redundant accounts is worth doing before you tackle aggregation.

• Total cash on hand — one consolidated figure across every account.
• Net monthly burn — cash out less cash in, averaged over recent months.
• Runway — months of cash left at current burn: the headline number for the founder and the board.
• Next payroll and rent — the near-term commitments, and whether today's balance covers them.
• Expected vs actual closing balance — the daily or weekly discipline check that flags drift early.

• Consolidated group cash — broken down by entity, bank and currency.
• Available vs restricted cash — what you can actually deploy today versus what is trapped, pledged or minimum-operating balance.
• Cash in reporting currency — converted at a consistent, dated FX rate.
• Net cash / net debt — cash less drawn borrowings and overdrafts.
• Bank concentration — how much of the group's cash sits with each counterparty.
• Actual vs forecast variance, by entity — so you can see where the drift originates.

• Global consolidated position — daily, by entity, bank and currency.
• Total available liquidity — cash plus undrawn committed facilities: the real capacity to act.
• Restricted, trapped and minimum operating cash by entity — so headline cash isn't mistaken for usable cash.
• Bank counterparty exposure and concentration — against approved limits.
• Cash-pool and intercompany positions — notional/physical pool balances and intra-group lending.
• Intraday position — for large payment and settlement flows.
• Reconciliation exceptions — the count of unmatched or unexplained items, and who owns them.