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Reporting - Fundamentals

What It Is (General)

Treasury reporting encompasses all activities related to creating, distributing, and analyzing financial reports about cash position, liquidity, investments, and related metrics. Reports can be operational (daily cash position), tactical (weekly variance analysis), or strategic (monthly board summaries).

What It Means for Our ICP

How Treasury Teams Think About It

Treasury teams view reporting as both a necessity and a bottleneck. They need accurate, timely reports but often lack the tools to create them independently.

Key mental models: - Self-service vs. dependency: Teams want to build their own reports, not wait for IT/vendors - Operational vs. executive: Different audiences need different views and detail levels - Static vs. interactive: Snapshots for distribution, live dashboards for analysis

Typical Processes & Timing

  • Daily: Cash position reports (often manual, early morning)
  • Weekly: Regional rollups, variance summaries
  • Monthly: CFO/board reporting, investment summaries
  • Ad-hoc: Custom analysis requests that create backlogs

Personio's Reporting Process (Source: 2024-10-03) - T+1: Best-effort cash flow report using bank statements; manual categorization - T+11/T+12: Full accuracy when Workday ERP reconciliation completes - Two main report types: Cash flow reporting (transactional categorization) and cash/investments reporting - Key challenge: Operating vs non-operating split across all categories

Tools They Use Today

  • Looker - BI platform connected to data warehouse (Mentioned by: ON)
  • BigQuery - Data warehouse backend (Mentioned by: ON)
  • Power BI - Alternative BI tool with broader customization (Mentioned by: ON)
  • Excel - Still used for custom analysis and distribution (Mentioned by: ON)
  • Workday ERP - Source of reconciled transaction data (Mentioned by: Personio)
  • Pivot tables - Used for automated refresh and summary generation (Mentioned by: Personio)

How They Talk About It

  • "Self-service" - ability to build reports without IT help
  • "Drill-down" - click from summary to detail
  • "Scheduled publishing" - automated email/Slack distribution
  • "Quick filters" / "Filter buttons" - easy dashboard filtering
  • "Top N" - top 5 banks, top 10 accounts
  • "Pivot tables" - flexible data analysis
  • "Tell a story" - reports need context and opinion, not just data (Sonder)
  • "See attached" - the anti-pattern of sending raw data without explanation (Sonder)
  • "Distribution lists" - email lists that stakeholders manage themselves (Sonder)

"Instead of waiting a day for you building a dashboard for us... just putting it ourselves, I think it makes life easier for you." - Rodrigo, ON

"We feel very spoiled." - Amanda, ON

"The starting point should be variance analysis, right? It should be the review of actual versus forecast. At the moment, that starting point is way way back where we're copying through, we're doing the data validation." - Tom Thorn, Personio

"You should have an opinion about it, right? You should tell... Give me two bullets or something. It's a pet peeve of mine, actually, when people send reports and say 'See attached.'" - David Watt, Sonder

ON's Dashboard & Visualization Preferences (Source: 2025-10-07) - Dashboard structure: Global currency flows at top, cash pool detail in middle, non-pooled accounts at bottom - Visual conventions: Columns = flows (transactions), Lines = balances (point in time) - Reconciliation check: Initial balance + movement = closing balance (quick data completeness validation) - Export use case: Tables exported to Excel for further manipulation and pivot analysis - "I love how this looks and it just feels very, very useful, but then you have to validate it to say, Hey, yeah, we trust it." - Amanda

Sonder's Report Distribution (Source: 2024-10-03) - 20-30 automated reports go out daily by 8 AM - Uses distribution lists that stakeholders control themselves - Mix of daily, weekly, and monthly reports based on activity levels - "If they're only reconciling the account once a month, they only need one report once a month"

Sources: view all