U of C's Powell says it's a fantastic success. "On a typical day, we'd generate 10 pages of journal entries, involving five banks and a few hundred subsidiary accounts, with all kinds of inter-company transactions, all of which had to be entered and audited manually," he says. "Now all that has effectively been automated. There are still some third-party transactions that can require manual review, but even there we can capture a lot of that information up front, so the research is done."

The new Treasury Sciences program feeds into the U of C's treasury operation, which Powell says is a kind of in-house money market fund. "We have a treasury operation that manages an $8-billion portfolio of short-term investments," Powell explains. The new system allows daily positioning requirements, as well as short- and medium-term funding requirements for each campus, to be passed on to "our investment people and they can go out and invest the cash appropriately. We have had a huge increase in controls, which also increases our security dramatically," he says.

Pande says eForce Global's product handles cash management (including daily positioning and defining liquidity), electronic funds transfer, including the XML-based issuance of payments, plus long-term forecasting, audit and fraud protection.

"It's a very adaptable system," says Pande. "Even if it's a question of changing a bank, it's all end-user driven and easy to do." At the same time, he says, the system offers multiple levels of security and privacy protection. For example, the system's transparency and controls allow for multiple approvals where needed–for instance, for larger disbursements–and private approvals where privacy is required–for example, where a CEO might approve a bonus for an executive but doesn't want that decision widely advertised.

"This eForce Global product certainly seems to focus a lot on cash forecasting and generally on keeping track of cash balances in terms of accounts payable, accounts receivable and what's in the bank," says Elizabeth St-Onge, a managing director at the Chicago-based consultancy Treasury Strategies. "Being fully Web-based is something new, and it looks like a great solution that is coming onto the market at a perfect time."

Companies have always struggled with the difficult challenge of cash forecasting, trying to estimate how much cash an operation needs on hand each day or week, St-Onge explains.

"In the past, though, this was a value-added thing that most companies couldn't achieve, given the need to focus on operations. But this economic crisis is forcing companies to get back to basics. Treasury operations are seen as more strategic instead of just clerical," she says.

The product is offered on an application service provider (ASP) provider basis, which means eForce Global hosts and supports it via the Web. Adopting it simplifies what used to be a months-long process of selecting a vendor and then installing systems that could introduce "all kinds of surprises," says Pande. "With our online system, you can try it out right away, and be operational in days or weeks."

At U of C, he says, there were enough people on staff at the central office and the 10 campuses to try out Treasury Sciences while operating its legacy system at the same time over a period of four months. "That allowed them to see if they were getting different answers and to figure out why," he says.

For other customers, Pande says, costs could range from $10,000 to $100,000 a month, depending on the size and complexity of the company. "We're trying to change the way people evaluate a product like ours," Pande says.

Customers can start out on a month-to-month basis to see how they like it. For private companies, the first two months of a trial are free, he says. "That really reduces your risk, because you don't have to commit to a product until you've seen that it works for you."

"This was a mission-critical operation for us, as it is for most companies." says the university's Powell. "With this system, we're seeing a fair amount of improved productivity, which is freeing up time for our people to do more value-added activity in place of the clerical work they were doing before."