Win's success with A/P has been aided by an aggressive p-card program, Metzger reports. "We've displaced a lot of checks–at least 1,500 a month–by using the p-card," he notes. "We have people using p-cards at most of our 550 locations."

Win has room for further progress. All told, the corporation generates about 40,000 payments a month and writes checks to settle 25,000 of them, Allen reports. For the large trade suppliers, Win encourages EDI. "We want to get out of the check-writing business," he declares. "And Win is investigating EIPP solutions with some of our larger customers," he adds. "There are some innovative solutions out there for supply chain settlements, and we're looking into them."

Jeffery is impressed: "On the A/P side, they've built a complete image-based workflow that outsources the whole payment generation piece to a bank," he points out. "They took all that work off the finance team's plate but still managed to make it look like the local companies are paying. It's centralized efficiency with a local look and feel. They're moving aggressively to electronic payments, streamlining the cash-conversion cycle and managing their working capital more efficiently."

Now, aided by remote deposit, Win is rapidly bringing automated efficiency to what had been a cumbersome A/R operation. Before Check 21, decentralization required that incoming payments be made to local entities and deposited in local bank accounts, which often meant that cash wouldn't be available in the corporate concentration account for seven to 10 days, Allen explains. Not any more. "Our remote deposit solution with Wells Fargo puts the bank on the desktop of the local presidents," he says. "It's working great for us. Now it takes just one day to turn a check in a local office into good funds in our concentration account."

Win has installed check scanners in 250 locations and plans to add them to the rest of its sites in the first quarter of 2008, Metzger reports. The 250 Win companies with scanners now deposit $3 million to $4 million a day, on average, by scanning 4,500-5,000 checks and sending transmissions to Wells Fargo, Metzger explains. Wells processes the transmissions and wires the money to the JPMC concentration account, where excess cash often is used to reduce borrowings. Once remote deposit is rolled out to the other 250 locations, roughly 90% of Win's $2.6 billion in annual revenue will take this fast track to good funds, he estimates. Then, he confides, "we plan to close as many local bank accounts as we can."

Because of its decentralized structure, Win never found wholesale lockbox to be an economical option, but remote deposit was almost a made-to-order solution. "When Check 21 came on the scene, we got excited because it provided a way to keep collections local but still get money quickly to a concentration account where we could use it to pay down debt or make investments," Metzger says.

And a potential reconciliation nightmare could be avoided. "We tag everything electronically so that we know which company each check came from and that makes the reconciliation easier," Metzger explains. The internal cash system tracks what funds in the concentration account came from which company.

WinWholesale is "one of the few large companies to really embrace remote deposit enthusiastically," notes Eric Fries, a Wells Fargo vice president. "They saw the benefits early on and quickly asked their banks for proposals. Not only will they soon be able to deposit all checks into one account nationwide, but they'll be able to go to one place to see all return-item activity."

Borrowing has also been centralized. Until last year, each local company borrowed from a local bank under its own credit agreement. "We did a study of borrowing rates and found that we could do a lot better with one central credit facility," Allen explains. "Now each local company can draw against the revolving credit with Chase, based on its capitalization."

The credit syndication process fed the cash management improvements. The banks in the syndicate–"SunTrust, Wachovia, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase–all made good suggestions and helped us take our cash operation to the next level," Metzger says.

While payment outsourcing, remote deposit and credit syndication are all standard bank services, Win's maverick ways are evident in its IT infrastructure. At Win, you won't find an ERP system linked to a treasury workstation–the typical anchors of a centralized, automated treasury. "We use no treasury workstation," Allen explains. "Most of our software is written in-house and maintained on our mainframe. We only use bank software to check our daily balances at JPMorgan and Wells Fargo and to wire out funds daily, and we're working to automate that communication."

Outsiders agree that the relationship with IT at Win is a rare commodity. "Treasury at Win enjoys a big commitment from IT, far and away the biggest I've seen anywhere," notes Janette Hutton, vice president for treasury sales at Chase. "Win is creative and innovative about how they help their service centers, and they have the IT resources to implement what they decide to do."