Cash management is a broad term that covers a number of functions that help individuals and businesses process receipts and payments in an organized and efficient manner. Administering cash assets today often makes use of a number of automated support services offered by banks and other financial institutions. Services range from simple checkbook balancing to investing and using software that allows easy, automated cash collection. Proper management of company funds requires those in the finance department to be extremely literate regarding the different strategies and tools available. Technology is drastically changing how businesses manage their funds, streamlining processes.
Definition
Cash management is a set of strategies or techniques a company uses to collect, track and invest money. Although cash by definition refers only to paper or coin money, in cash management, companies usually also work with cash equivalents such as checks. This is becoming increasingly common as the money system becomes more abstract, using electronic methods.
Purpose
In general, small businesses do not always have the ability to obtain the credit they might need. They have to rely more on their own money to meet expenses. Even in a large business, costs might come up that are not expected. Being unable to handle these situations puts a company at risk for loss of revenue or, in the worst case scenario, going out of business.

Automate and Control Your Cash Flow
Workday Cash Management can help streamline your payment processes while giving you greater control and visibility over the lifeblood of your business.
With Workday Cash Management you can: * Track and manage your business’s bank accounts * Import and automatically reconcile bank statements * Settle all transactions across Spend, Finance, Revenue, and Payroll from a single settlement engine * Process all types of electronic transactions easily * Gain real-time visibility into cash balances * More accurately forecast cash flow into the future
The ultimate measure of a business is cash. Using Workday Cash Management, companies can automate the coordination and control of cash-flow activity. Workday can automate administrative and control activities, such as bank statement reconciliation, and also provide embedded actionable analytics for better insight and decision making.
Banking
* Track and manage your business's financial institutions, branches, and bank accounts * Create depository and source bank accounts * Transfer funds between accounts, record voided checks, and run detailed transaction reports
Bank Account Reconciliation * Load bank statements using BAI2 file format * Automatically reconcile based on user-defined rules and generate transactions for first-notice items * Generate worksheets to support reconciliation, view suggested matches to unreconciled items, and create resulting account reconciliation entries
Settlement
* Leverage a unified settlement engine to manage all payments across the entire business for any purpose, resulting in improved cash visibility and management * Settle payroll, supplier payments, employee reimbursements, customer refunds, etc., from one place * Process direct debits, customer credit cards, paper checks, other electronic transactions (ACH, EDI, ISO20022 ) and positive pay * Support ad hoc transactions to record miscellaneous activities against any bank or petty cash accounts * Capture approvals and automate routings, integrations, and reports from settlement and payment release through bank reconciliation
Real-Time Cash Forecasting * Get overview of outstanding inflows and outflows to support decisions about funding, paying, and collecting money * Get real-time visibility into cash balances to more accurately forecast cash flows in the future * Drill down, across, and through operational transactions for more detailed reporting insight

Principles of