Field Notes · 28 April 2026
Reconciling liquidity views to the bank
Cash position screens in treasury applications often look authoritative. Auditing them means tracing every feed and every manual adjustment back to something a bank would recognise.
Many treasury teams open the morning with a liquidity dashboard inside their management application. For financial audit purposes, that screen is only as strong as the feeds beneath it and the discipline around manual adjustments.
Trace the feed, not the colour coding
We ask which bank statements, prior-day closes, and intra-day files populate each balance. If a “available cash” figure mixes cleared balances with expected receipts that have not yet hit the bank, the application should label that distinction clearly. Ambiguous labels create false comfort during funding decisions.
Manual adjustments need owners
Adjustments for cheques in transit, pool allocations, or timing differences should carry a user, a timestamp, and a reverse-by date. In several Bangkok engagements we found adjustments that aged quietly for weeks because the application allowed them to sit without expiry. The financial risk is not always large on day one; the control failure is the loss of a clean trail.
Tie-out discipline
Pick a sample of reporting dates and tie the application’s entity-level cash to bank statements and to the general ledger cash accounts. Differences that “always exist” deserve a written explanation. If nobody can explain them in one paragraph, the liquidity view is not yet audit-ready.