IC Activity - Pain Points & Challenges¶

Pain Points¶

Cash pool accounts show misleading negative balances - "Seeing this minus is not really helpful" - pooled accounts always show negative but this isn't a real problem because sweeps cover them
Source: ON (2025-11-17)
No indication whether negative is real overdraft - Someone not doing this daily wouldn't know if a negative is a problem or expected pool behavior
Source: ON (2025-11-17)
Failed IC payments go unnoticed across regions - "$8 million payment from Canada failed and no one noticed... not even the Americas team"
Source: ON (2026-02-04)

No proactive alerting for IC payment failures - Teams only discover issues when balances are unexpectedly high/low
Source: ON (2026-02-04) - "They only realized because they were like, 'how can we pay 16 million this week? It's double what we usually pay'"
Regional teams lack visibility into IC payment status - Central treasury doesn't share IC monitoring effectively with regional hubs
Source: ON (2026-02-04)

Can't distinguish capex funding from operational IC - Cash pools fund both, but capex needs separate IC contracts
Source: ON (2026-02-04) - "We don't want to fund capex needs with cash pool... the entities will never be able to pay back short term"
Don't know capex funding amounts for IC loan setup - Need historical data to determine IC contract terms
Source: ON (2026-02-04) - "We need to set up an IC contract... and we don't know how much"

Forecasts don't reflect sweep activity - Kyriba doesn't show that operational cash out in Germany will result in sweep from master account
Source: ON (2025-11-17)
No category for cash pool classification - Had to manually name accounts in Kyriba to indicate pool membership; no proper system category
Source: ON (2025-11-17)
Entity-level variance looks wrong without IC forecast - At global level IC nets to zero, but entity-level variance analysis shows misleading numbers when intercompany isn't forecasted. "The forecast will look very wrong if you see just a balance"
Source: ON (2026-01-28) - Amanda: "Some entities have negative balance... which makes sense because we don't forecast intercompany"

Can't distinguish automatic sweeps from IC settlements - Need to know if a transfer was automatic pooling vs paying an intercompany invoice
Source: ON (2025-11-17)

IC categorization fails on transaction type - System misidentifies IC as FX transfers or ZBA transfers instead of proper IC type (cost plus, dividend, loan, equity)
Source: Palm Internal (2026-02-02) - Giannis: "IC categorization failed couple of times and categorized it as FX transfers or ZBA transfers"
Two-level IC categorization problem - First determine if it's intercompany, then what TYPE of intercompany. Both are challenging.
Source: Palm Internal (2026-02-02) - "There's one is this an intercompany transaction? Yes or no?... Problem is, okay, it's intercompany, but what intercompany? Is it a cost plus? Is it a dividend? Is it a loan payment?"
Transaction descriptions lack sufficient data - Descriptions don't indicate if payment is tax, interest, dividend, loan, etc.
Source: Palm Internal (2026-02-02) - "The transaction description does not mention anything if it's a tax, if it an interest, if it's a dividend"
Treasury lacks visibility on AP-driven cost plus payments - Large monthly settlements ($5-20M) kicked off by AP, not treasury
Source: Palm Internal (2026-02-02) - Gurjit: "Those payments are typically kicked off by your AP team. And so treasury doesn't always have visibility"

"Internal transfer" vs "intercompany" confusion - Internal = same entity different accounts (book transfer); Intercompany = different legal entities. Terminology causes misunderstanding.
Source: Palm Internal (2026-02-02) - ON had both categories that were "very close to each other" and "couldn't separate"