Understanding Cash Forecasting

In Treasury Management, a position is the total financial value of a particular set of transactions that are performed on behalf of an enterprise. A cash position analyzes cash flows to determine the amount of cash that is available at a particular time. Cash flow, or cash forecasting, is the modeling of a company or asset’s future financial liquidity over a specific time frame. Cash usually refers to a company’s total bank balances, but cash forecasting captures your company's treasury position, which is cash plus short-term investments minus short-term debt. A treasury position can include non-cash flow data. Cash flow is the change in cash or treasury position from one period to the next.

PeopleSoft Cash Management provides a simplified worksheet tool for managing your treasury organization's cash forecasting. You can configure the cash forecast dimensions and forecast rules to meet your business needs, support drilling down to details to access more information about the cash forecast results, plug in multiple sources that affect cash forecast results, and support a CSV file interface or XML file interface to bring in cash forecast data from any source.

Click to watch a short video about PeopleSoft Cash Position and Forecasting.

The cash forecasting worksheet functionality enables you to:

  • Manage position worksheets (rather than trees).

  • Create intraday bank reporting worksheets.

  • Create cash position worksheet (CPW) data manually.

  • Generate Cash Management position reports.

The Cash Forecast Results enable cash managers to view the cash position in several dimensions, such as bank, bank account, currency, business unit, and several more that you can configure during setup. From any cash forecasting results view, you can click on a line item to drill down into details. Configured at the position source, drill down functionality can take you directly to the source transaction.

Saved searches provide an instant view of your cash forecast results in your preferred dimensions. The relative date option in the search criteria enables users to define saved searches once and use them daily.

The cash forecasting process in PeopleSoft Cash Management adds flexibility to maintenance and reporting. In addition to defining source sets and manual position entry, you can:

  • Define variance and variance alerts with cues.

  • Display non-cash flow data.

  • Use a streamlined worksheet setup.

  • Select multiple position currencies.