Treasury's job is to keep the business funded and the cash moving. And for most companies, it does exactly that — bills get paid, payroll goes out, revenue comes in. But "keeping up" and "optimizing" are two different things, and the gap between them has a real dollar figure attached to it.
There are two ways this plays out most often.
Your cash isn't working
Cash sitting in an operating account isn't neutral — it's a decision to earn nothing. At current market rates, conservative government money market funds are yielding in the 3–4% range. On $10M in idle operating cash, that's roughly $300K–$400K per year sitting on the table.
The reasons it goes unaddressed are usually straightforward: it's a manual process no one has bandwidth for, there's no internal policy guidance on where cash can go, or the visibility simply isn't there to know how much is actually available to put to work. None of those are unreasonable constraints — but they're all solvable ones, and the cost of not solving them compounds quietly over time.
You have cash — just not where you need it
The other scenario looks different but comes from the same root cause. The business has grown fast, the banking footprint has expanded with it — multiple accounts, multiple banks, entities across time zones — and the infrastructure hasn't kept pace.
When no one has a consolidated view of cash across the structure, things slip. A large vendor payment hits an account that looked fine yesterday. A payroll run processes before an intercompany transfer clears. You end up drawing on your revolver not because you need liquidity, but because you didn't have visibility into where the cash actually was.
That's not a cash shortage — that's an information shortage, and it's an expensive one. Unnecessary revolver draws, interest charges on borrowing that didn't need to happen, and the operational scramble to sort it out after the fact all carry real cost.
The fix isn't always technology
Both of these problems share a common thread: without a consolidated, reliable view of cash, your team is in reactive mode. The decisions that should be easy — do we invest this? do we need to fund this account? — become hard because the information isn't there when you need it.
Getting out of that mode doesn't always require a TMS or a major infrastructure overhaul. Sometimes it's a well-built dashboard, a disciplined daily positioning process, or a rationalized bank structure that makes visibility possible in the first place. The goal is to get your team out of bank portals and into a decision-making posture — where the cash picture is clear enough to act on, not just react to.
Not sure where your gaps are? Reach out at amy@talasadvisory.com and we can talk through what your current setup actually needs.
Amy Norman
Founder & Principal, Talas Advisory
Amy is an operator-first treasury leader with over a decade of experience building and running treasury functions in complex, high-growth environments — including a decade at Amazon across cash operations, liquidity management, investments, FX, and banking infrastructure. She founded Talas to bring that same discipline to companies building their treasury function for the first time.