Cash Flow Management

The company financial department should provide the effective attraction and utilization of financial resources, optimization of due payments and the size of free cash balances. To achieve this, they have to solve the following tasks:

• creation of cash flow budget with various planning horizons based on open customer and vendor balances, existing payment terms, etc;
• planning of incoming payments and attraction of loan funds based on payment schedule;
• regulating movements of payment inquiries;
• creation of electronic register for payment inquiries and actual payments based on priorities;
• coordination between payments and approved budgets;
• report generation based on posted payments.

To make this happen the following processes of organizational financial management should be automated: planning, control and regulation of cash transactions.

NaviCon Cash Flow Management solution for Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics AX realized the full-range functionality for financial flow and its control. This solution automates payment initiation, consolidation and approval processes (including budget control), creation of payment documents and their transfer to Client-Bank systems. While a payment inquiry is moving within a company, its statuses are changed dynamically while all the participants of this process are notified by email. Functional benefits of NaviCon Cash Flow Management are described below.

Creation of cash flow budgets is necessary for scheduling the cash inflow and outflow. The approved cash flow budget forms the basis for plan\actual analysis and for creation of cost limits for budget items, which are later used to control cash outflow.

The revenue side of the budget can be created based on customer due balances, sales plan, incoming payment inquiries, etc. The expenditure budget can include such data as vendor due balances, purchase plans, expenditure inquiries, etc. The created budget lines can be corrected, approved and confirmed.

Payment inquiry management process includes the following basic steps:

• entry of payment inquiries, creation of an inquiry list and payments with links to the source documents;
• inquiry approval with regard to regulations, approval chains for each inquiry type;
• budget control of payment inquiry based payments;
• planning of incoming payments and expenditures, calendar and bank (cash) accounts planning, creation of payment schedules;
• automatic creation of payment documents;
• monitoring of payment inquiries statuses and corresponding payments;
• generating reports regarding cash flow budget execution.

Approval of payment inquiries can be flexibly setup with indication of both mandatory and substitution participants of the approval process. The system automatically notifies the participating users about the inquiry status and the results of its movement through the approval chain.

Creation process of payment schedules includes:

• planning of bank accounts initial balances;
• inflow planning;
• allocation of current payments per payment dates;
• allocation of current payments per bank accounts.

Payment documents are automatically created after the scheduled payments have been allocated per monetary accounts. The system automatically tracks the amounts in open payment documents and paid amounts (posted payment documents) per each payment inquiry. These data are dynamically updated in the Payment Inquiry Card. Depending on whether the inquiry is fully or partially paid the corresponding status is assigned. Inquiry execution data are visible for the user who created it.

Those companies who use NaviCon Cash Flow Management solution get the following benefits:

• optimization and streamlining of inquiry flow;
• possibility to create a single payment processing center for all the companies within a group;
• possibility to create complex approval chains (including multistep and parallel chains with variant selection based on the amount in the inquiry);
• automatic user notification when the inquiry status changes;
• availability of budget cumulative data for each expenditure, actual costs, and approved planned expenditures;
• creation of cash flow budget based on operation profits and scheduled payments;
• possibility to adjust balances on monetary accounts with regard to the events that have not yet been registered in the system.
• differentiated user access to inquiry data and entries, budgets and actual expenditures;
• user role-based participation in the payment inquiry document flow;
• storage of inquiry entries history.