Treasury innovation is a point of pride at Microsoft. The centralized treasury group serves more than 450 subsidiaries in 118 countries around the world, managing over 1,300 bank accounts distributed among 85 different banks. Not surprisingly, cash visibility is a perpetual challenge. In the past decade, Microsoft treasury has pushed to achieve greater visibility into bank accounts and subsidiaries' investments.

"We have a very good idea of what and where our balances are," explains senior treasury manager Dave Piechowski, "but unlike a lot of large treasuries, we don't maintain a single companywide treasury management system. We've built our own Cash Forecasting & Analytics Reporting [CFAR] solution. And one of the things we've been working on, companywide, is maximizing the amount of information that feeds directly from our banks into our ERP [enterprise resource planning] and CFAR systems."