Ed Barrie's first daily task as group manager of treasury at Microsoft is opening up his treasury workstation from SAP and taking the pulse of its financial health. "The dashboard is great for horizontal processes like general ledger, accounts payable and managing our cash positions," Barrie enthuses from the tech giant's Redmond, Wash.-based headquarters.

Across the country in Dublin, Ohio, Linda Harty starts her day a bit differently. "We have an SAP treasury workstation that we use for booking transactions and posting journal entries but we don't use it very often for analytical purposes ," says Harty, executive vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health Inc., an $87 billion global manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies. "I don't want to put it down, but it's too mechanical. We find that spreadsheets best meet our needs. We'd rather look at the data on the spreadsheet and use our brainpower to make decisions."

Two treasurers, two different approaches. While treasury workstations have evolved into sophisticated amalgams of enterprise-wide data–account balances, transactions, forecasts, cash positions, debts, investments, and pretty much anything else that occupies finance–they remain a tool. And like all tools, especially the more sophisticated ones, sometimes it's easier to do things the old way.