Financial reporting is under a magnifying glass, but many companies still integrate treasury data from different banks manually, leading to inaccuracies that impede compliance.

Suppose that the treasury policy of Company X prohibits investing more than $50 million in any single credit. The business's money manager, who is well aware of the policy, takes a $50 million position in Ford paper. The next day, he is out sick and the company's risk manager fills in for him. With $10 million to place, the risk manager calls the broker, who says, "Hey, you bought Ford yesterday. It looks good again today, and we can do the whole lot in one credit." Unintentionally, the risk manager blows his company's investment limit -- and the treasurer will have to account for the violation.

Controls that prevent this kind of mistake are one of many benefits of using a treasury workstation. "In this example, everyone thought they were on the same page, yet there was still a violation of board policy," says Lorne Hamilton, director of client development for Richmond Software Ltd., a London-based provider of treasury management systems. "A system checks credit availability and sends a message immediately if you're over your limit, so it safeguards [against] any slipups."

With scrutiny of financial transactions at an all-time high, the need to foolproof treasury operations has taken on critical importance. Treasury workstations, or treasury management systems, are designed to do just that by automating a company's basic financial transactions and greatly reducing the level of human intervention treasury processes require. Users universally report that the fewer times human hands touch treasury-related transactions, the more accurate the numbers are.

Jim Burns, general manager for treasury management with the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) -- the second-largest public transportation system in the United States -- says that the Oracle treasury workstation his organization implemented last year has improved the reliability of the information he uses to do his job.

"It's much better to be able to see when receipts are coming in and disbursements are going out in one contained analysis, rather than looking at an accounts payable worksheet, an accounts receivable worksheet, and then matching it up manually with a treasury investment worksheet," Burns points out.