Imagine that you’re the head of a real estate company that has 90 bank accounts. You want to know the details of your cashflow, so you request that someone from the accounting team update you on the activity and cash balances twice a day. The employee spends his entire week doing this manually — checking each of the 90 accounts and transferring data into a spreadsheet.
You know this is an inefficient use of this person’s time and that the process is prone to human error. But you need this updated information. What if you could automate the process, getting the information you need while freeing up your accountant for more strategic, high‐value deliverables?
We worked with one of our large real estate clients to create exactly this solution — an automated cashflow report that allows the client to easily track the inflows/outflows while keeping a handle on the company’s actual cash position.
Leveraging an automated bot, the tool can effortlessly tap into a company’s bank and accounting system to pull the information required to prepare the summary report. The company maintains the ability to manually enter transactions to create what/if scenarios, which are key to accurate planning in a variety of situations.
We think this tool will offer a wealth of benefits to real estate enterprises. With the help of this automated tool, companies will be able to:
We are now developing this tool into one that we can deploy with any client and that can scale to handle any scope. The tool currently provides a report on the company’s cash position at a point in time.
Our next step is to add additional layers of functionality, including cashflow forecasting, covenant compliance and reporting, and KPIs. With those extras in place, companies like the one with 90 bank accounts can move beyond cashflow tracking to get more intentional around goal‐setting, compliance‐monitoring, and strategic decision‐making.