COVID-19 Impact / Daily Cash / 13-Week Rolling Cash Forecast Solution

COVID-19’s effects on business has been devastating, which makes cash planning a necessity. A global Fortune 1000 organization, with 92 reporting entities in over 30 functional currencies that wanted to quickly understand the impact of COVID-19 on its business, reached out to Finit. Specifically, our client wanted to better understand its cash and liquidity positions at a much deeper level across the organization – with a daily and a 3-month rolling cash forecast. And, they wanted the solution fast. 

In this Finit Solution Spotlight, we tell the story of how Finit, with its unmatched OneStream expertise, turned vision into reality with another successful, client-tailored, innovative solution, designed to deliver critical data visibility, granular detail, process completeness, and risk mitigation…all in 2 weeks!

Here's our story.

Solution Highlights

This solution created the ability for our client to:

• Analyze current actual cash position by day, by underlying bank-account currency for each reporting entity, and as consolidated.
• Project cash burn, pooling opportunities, and liquidity needs by collecting and analyzing a 3-month forecast.
• Gain insight into temporary and permanent impacts on current and forecasted results for COVID-19 in order to adjust financial strategies.
• Collect supporting detail and amounts related to COVID-19 impact to support insurance reimbursement claims.
• Utilize foreign currency translation functionality:
  • Foreign currency translation is calculated from transactional to functional and functional to reporting currencies in OneStream.
  • Constant rate translation based on existing FX rates
• Build reporting quickly:
  • Employs OneStream's financial intelligence for signage (inflows/outflows), translation, and consolidation
  • Uses actual cash balances to seed the cash projections

Cash is King

Companies use many ways to review and project cash activity in order to gain insight into liquidity. With today's unprecedented business challenges, visibility into cash balances and projections is of paramount importance. However, in many global organizations without a single-instance ERP, it’s difficult to understand exactly what the company’s daily cash position is. In addition, reporting entities may hold cash in multiple bank accounts in multiple currencies making consolidation and analysis even more difficult.

How Much Cash Will We Have?

Our client is a publicly traded, Fortune 1000, global organization consisting of 92 individual reporting entities that serve different markets around the world. Our client needed a way to quickly gather and consolidate daily cash balances for each reporting entity up to total consolidated amounts. Additionally,  they needed a 3-month rolling forecast of the expected cash inflows and outflows from each business to better understand the total, consolidated impact of COVID-19 on their company.

They needed this critical information in a timely manner to determine how much liquidity would need to be generated and/or borrowed, and to which businesses it would need to be distributed. Finally, as a global organization where many reporting entities carry cash balances in different currencies, the company also required a controlled and automated process to translate foreign currency.

Client-Tailored Technical Solutions

Some process and reporting challenges were solved through client-tailored technical solutions, such as:

• Collecting, translating, and consolidating daily cash balances for every reporting entity
• Ensuring cash inflows and outflows could be viewed on a MTD, QTD, and YTD basis
• Minimizing the need for weekly maintenance within OneStream from the administrator team
• Limiting data storage to ensure maximum performance over time

Client Benefits

By performing this process within OneStream, there is now:

• No need to email spreadsheets
• No need for manual offline work to create visibility
• No time lag between submission and reporting
• One less reason to use of Excel

OneStream allowed for visibility into each business unit's status, leveraged its data integrity controls, and allowed for meaningful reporting for our client's CFO organization.

In only 2 weeks our client achieved COVID-19 impact analysis, daily cash balance reporting, and a 3 month cash forecasting process by business unit, region, and consolidated total company – translated at constant Fx rates – with cash flow details!

To learn more about this Cash Forecasting solution and other Finit Solution Spotlights, please contact us at insights@finit.com.