Why Corporate Treasury reconciliation remains a trove of unsolved problems

Treasury operations shouldn't be this hard. Yet walk into most corporate finance departments and you'll find treasury teams still managing cash, liquidity, P&L, balance-sheet and settlements across multiple banks using spreadsheets, fragmented data feeds, and fragmented processes, which are unmeasurable and prone to errors. It's 2026 and we're still solving problems that should have been automated a decade ago.

We work with treasury teams every day. Here's what we hear consistently: the data is messy, the process is manual, and nobody has confidence in their liquidity position until day three or four of the month-end close.

Treasury sits at the intersection of everything in finance. End of day and intraday Cash flows. Bank settlements. FX movements. Inter-company transfers. Balance-sheet substantiations. Each of these moves at different speeds, through different channels, with different data formats. A company with five banks, three ERPs, and one TMS doesn't have five reconciliation problems. They have dozens.

Most treasury teams we meet are still working with yesterday's tools. Here's what this looks like in practice:

The data problem. Banks deliver statements through different channels. Some via SWIFT, some through proprietary APIs, some via SFTP and flat data files with formatting that hasn't changed since early 2000s. Getting this data into your system in a consistent, clean state is a manual undertaking. Missing reconciliation items sit in spreadsheets waiting for someone to investigate.

The reconciliation burden. A treasury team with $10 billion in daily flows might manually reconcile bank statements against their ERP every single day and considering the manual nature of the process, these reconciliations can only be performed in batch mode, hopefully daily. When items don't match, the investigation process is done line by line and in Excel. High-volume intercompany flows create month-end bottlenecks where you're not finalizing numbers until the third week of closing. This delays reporting, creates audit pressure, and eats enormous amounts of time.

The visibility gap. You can't see your true liquidity position until reconciliation is complete. This matters. Treasury needs real-time visibility into available cash, pending settlements, and FX exposures. Waiting until day three of close doesn't cut it.

The control problem. When your processes are manual and spreadsheet-dependent, your control environment is fragile. Audit teams are rightfully skeptical. Payment controls are harder to enforce. You don't have clear evidence trails for exceptions. You're managing compliance risk through process heroics rather than system design.

The conversations around treasury have evolved throughout 2025. Three shifts are worth noting:

1. Regulatory and governance requirements are tightening. Treasury teams are under more scrutiny around payment controls, liquidity governance, and operational resilience. The days of "we'll sort this out during the audit" are over. Your control environment needs to be demonstrable, traceable, and real-time, or at minimum, intra-day.

2. TMS customization costs are unsustainable. Companies have spent heavily trying to customize their TMS to handle multi-bank reconciliation and data integration. It works, but it's expensive to maintain, difficult to scale, and creates technical debt. A dedicated solution that integrates with your TMS rather than replacing it makes more economic sense.

3. Treasury data is becoming a strategic asset. Forward-looking treasury functions are using their reconciliation data to inform liquidity forecasting, FX hedging, and working capital optimization. You can't do any of this if your data is locked in spreadsheets or buried in manual processes.

We built Gresham specifically for this problem. The approach is straightforward: take the manual reconciliation burden off your team, give you clean data in real-time, and integrate directly with whatever systems you already run.

Multi-bank data ingestion. We connect directly to your banks through APIs, SWIFT gateways or SFTP and take in data in any format, including ISO 20022. Data lands continuously, validated, and clean. No more waiting for statements. No more manual data entries.

Automated bank and cash reconciliations. Daily reconciliation of bank statements against your ERP (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics) or TMS (Kyriba, ION, SAP TRM) happens automatically. Exceptions surface immediately, exception-led rather than transaction-led. Your team investigates the five exceptions with all items that don't match due to same reason, instead of reviewing the five thousand items individually.

Intercompany and balance-sheet recs. Automated matching across entities reduces month-end cycle time meaningfully. Sign-offs and approvals, evidence and audit trails are built in. You're not waiting for email chains to resolve breaks.

Audit and control readiness. Your control environment is documented in real-time. Payment controls are enforced at the system level. Regulatory reporting data is accurate and traceable. Internal audit gets the evidence they need without running queries.

Integration, not replacement. We work with your TMS, your ERP, your bank connectivity stack. This isn't a rip-and-replace scenario. Fast rollout, minimal IT lift, scalable architecture.

Treasury teams using Gresham see material changes in their operations. Period-end close accelerates. Manual effort drops significantly. Data quality improves. Audit cycles get easier. But the bigger change is psychological: your treasury team stops managing spreadsheets and starts managing cash.

The tools exist to solve these problems. Corporate treasury reconciliation doesn't have to be this hard.

If your team is still managing multi-bank reconciliation manually, it's worth evaluating whether the status quo actually serves your organization's needs. The economics of doing nothing usually don't hold up once you factor in the cost of manual effort, the audit risk, and the visibility you're giving up on liquidity management. Treasury operations are complex. The process of reconciling them doesn't need to be.

Get in touch today to see how we can help.