Business leaders managing growing businesses often find the financial workflows they used when they had 10 or 20 employees don't scale when they reach 75 or 100+ employees. What started as manageable, but manual, tasks become time-consuming bottlenecks that drain productivity and create operational risks. That's when customized treasury management services become essential for improving efficiency to maintain competitive operations.
While many banks offer treasury management services, the competitive advantage comes from pairing them with a business-focused, dedicated expert who takes time to understand how money flows through your business and designs solutions to make that faster and more secure.
If you’re already using treasury management services like ACH payments, online banking, or fraud prevention, you’re on the right track. But many business leaders don't realize additional treasury management services and strategies can optimize their operations without adding staff.
What Are Treasury Management Services?
Treasury management services encompass five core components that work together to optimize and strengthen your company's financial operations. These services are the strategic backbone of your cash flow operations.
Information reporting gives you real-time visibility into your cash position across all accounts and locations. Rather than calling multiple banks or logging into different platforms to understand your financial position, consolidated reporting shows you exactly where your money sits at any given moment.
Liquidity management helps you make the most of your available cash. This includes automated sweeps that move excess funds into interest-bearing accounts overnight, zero-balance account structures that centralize cash management, and investment options for longer-term surplus funds.
Receivables acceleration focuses on getting money into your accounts faster through electronic payment processing, lockbox services that process customer payments directly at the bank, and remote deposit capture that eliminates trips to make deposits.
Payables optimization streamlines your accounts payable process by consolidating ACH, wire, check, and virtual card payments into a single automated system. This can reduce processing costs from $8 per check to 50 cents per ACH payment while generating revenue through virtual card rebates.
Fraud prevention protects your business through fraud prevention tools, dual approval workflows, and automated monitoring systems that flag unusual transactions before they become problems.
Is Your Treasury Management Services Strategy Working For You?
Treasury management strategy reviews should happen at least annually, similar to financial audits or insurance policy reviews. These are operational health checkups to identify process improvements, cost savings, and new risks that may have emerged as your business has changed.
During a comprehensive review, treasury management experts analyze your current processes and identify opportunities for optimization, efficiency, and increased security. They ensure your cash management strategies align with your growth plans.
Technology continues to advance rapidly in treasury management. Solutions that weren't available or cost-effective two years ago may now provide significant benefits for your business size and industry. Regular reviews ensure you're taking advantage of innovations that can improve efficiency or reduce costs.
Even if your current treasury management services work well, annual reviews help optimize settings, adjust transaction limits, and fine-tune automated processes based on how your business has evolved.
Who Needs Treasury Management Services?
Treasury management services benefit businesses across industries, but some companies see the most immediate impact, including:
Growing companies and multi-location businesses that often find their financial processes haven't kept pace with their transaction volume, available staff, or operational complexity across multiple locations.
Companies with large vendor networks benefit from treasury management services and especially integrated payables. Construction companies, healthcare organizations, and professional services firms that pay hundreds of vendors monthly can reduce processing costs and improve vendor relationships through automated payments.
Seasonal businesses require sophisticated cash flow management to handle fluctuating revenue. Service businesses, agricultural companies, and tourism-related businesses can use treasury management services to automatically move funds between operating and investment accounts based on seasonal patterns.
Companies in regulated industries often need enhanced controls and documentation for compliance purposes. Healthcare organizations, financial services firms, and government contractors can use dual approval workflows and detailed transaction reporting to meet regulatory requirements.
Smaller businesses benefit from efficiency and automation by leveraging their bank's treasury management experts to implement best practices to set their business up to scale in the future.
How Do Treasury Management Services Improve Cash Flow Efficiency?
Treasury management services can automate processes that many growing businesses still handle manually. Cash flow optimization helps you collect money faster, hold onto it longer, and put idle funds to work.
Often when our experts start to learn about companies’ financial processes, they hear about employees spending hours each week processing vendor payments and manually entering data. We can often cut administration time in half through better automation and integration.
Accelerating Your Receivables
Treasury management services that include electronic payment processing cut the time it takes money to reach your accounts. Instead of waiting on checks in the mail and check processing, electronic payments like ACH credits offer immediate availability of funds. Secure lockbox services allow customer checks to be sent directly to a payment processor which processes them hourly. Remote deposit capture eliminates bank trips as your team scans and deposits checks from the office for same-day availability of funds.
These solutions include customizable reporting that makes payment application and reconciliation easier. You can configure reports to categorize deposits by customer or payment method, which means your accounting team spends less time manually matching payments to invoices.
Optimizing Payables While Maintaining Vendor Relationships
Smart payables management focuses on automating bill payment processes and integrating them into your accounting software. Integrated payables, which consolidates all your vendor payments into a single automated system, saves you time and money. Processing a single paper check costs businesses between $2.05 and $8.00. For a company processing 3,000 payments monthly, converting just half to electronic payments can save $25,000 to $35,000 annually. Virtual card payments can actually generate revenue through cash rebates while keeping your banking information private.
Gaining Real-Time Cash Visibility
Multi-location businesses gain complete cash visibility through zero-balance account structures that automatically sweep funds to a central account overnight. Automated sweeps can also move excess operating funds into interest-bearing accounts, then return them as needed. The efficiency compounds as your business grows; systems that handle 100 transactions monthly can handle 1,000 transactions.
How Do Treasury Management Services Help Businesses Prevent Fraud?
Strong passwords and firewalls might protect your computer systems, but they can't stop someone from altering a check or using social engineering to trick your employee into changing vendor payment information or providing passwords. Treasury management services help to protect your financial transactions and processes with controls designed to prevent fraud.
When fraud hits your business, the financial loss is only part of the problem. The time-consuming aftermath includes reporting the incident, shutting down compromised accounts, opening new ones, and notifying every vendor about new account information. Incidents also might involve business disruption and a hit to your reputation with customers and vendors.
Modern fraud threats target business operations that companies often overlook. Check fraud remains surprisingly common because checks contain all the information needed to commit fraud. Business email compromise tricks employees into changing vendor payment details, redirecting legitimate payments to fraudulent accounts.
Treasury management services create layers of protection against threats. For instance, positive pay flags checks that don’t match your issued check register, stopping altered or forged checks before they clear your account.
Automated monitoring systems track transaction patterns and flag unusual activity. For instance, if someone tries to process a wire transfer outside your normal parameters or issues checks to new payees, the system stops the transaction for manual review. User-level permissions ensure employees can only access the specific functions they need for their job responsibilities.
Electronic payments reduce many fraud risks entirely. ACH payments require pre-authorization between you and your vendors, so they’re more difficult to tamper with. Virtual card payments use single-use credit card numbers that are invalid after one transaction, keeping your actual banking information private from vendors.
Beyond preventing fraud, these tools speed up fraud detection when incidents do occur. Instead of discovering problems weeks later during account reconciliation, real-time monitoring can alert you about suspicious activity quickly.
How To Choose The Right Treasury Management Services Partner
Not all banks specialize in treasury management services, and one-size-fits-all solutions rarely address the specific challenges growing businesses face. Look for a partner who understands how money flows through your particular business before recommending solutions. First Business Bank built its reputation by focusing on business clients, which means our treasury management experts understand the operational complexities that companies encounter. Our experienced treasury management experts customize solutions based on your industry, transaction volume, and growth plans rather than offering generic packages.
