What good looks like: a cash position reconciled by nine
A walk through the morning routine of a finance team that has automated collection and reconciliation — what is left for a human to do, and why that residue is the valuable part.
It is worth being concrete about the destination. Here is the morning routine of a healthcare group we work with — nine entities, three currencies, twenty-six bank accounts, and a finance team of six.
05:00 — files land
Overnight statements arrive from four banks. Two more are covered by intraday feeds that have been refreshing since the previous afternoon. Each line is classified against the group's cash flow categories using rules built during implementation.
Anything that does not match a rule is queued rather than guessed at.
06:30 — the position rebuilds
Balances consolidate by entity, then by division, then to group. Intercompany positions net where the entity map says they should. The prior day's closing balance is compared to the new opening balance, and any discrepancy is raised immediately — that check alone catches missing files.
07:00 — forecast and covenants roll
The week just closed is replaced with actuals. A new week thirteen is added. Collection curves update from actual receipt behaviour. Leverage, interest cover and minimum liquidity are recalculated and projected to the September test date.
08:15 — a human arrives
The group financial controller opens the position to a short exception list: three unmatched lines, one of which is a customer paying two invoices in one transfer, and a variance flag on receipts in the Dutch entity.
Resolving those takes twenty minutes. Nobody has downloaded a file, opened a bank portal, or rebuilt a workbook.
08:40 — commentary
Three paragraphs. Why receipts were light, what is expected to land before Friday, and a note that the September covenant projection has tightened slightly because of a capex phasing change.
This is the part that requires judgement, context and knowing the business. It is also the only part of the report anyone reads twice.
09:00 — sent
The pack goes to the CFO, the two divisional finance directors and the group board pack folder. Reproducible, traceable to the statement line, and identical in structure to every prior week.
The point of automating the first four hours is not the four hours. It is that the twenty minutes of judgement now happen every week, reliably, instead of being the thing that gets cut when the collection step overran.