Microsoft's bank account structure reflects the company's size and global market position. Every day, Microsoft receives more than 1,600 bank statements from more than 80 banking partners. Managing these data flows and pulling transaction information into the corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used to be a significant pain point for the cash operations team.

"The process for importing bank statements was very cumbersome," says Sabin Jafri, senior treasury manager in the cash operations group. "We leveraged predefined ERP reporting to extract data from the statements. But our ERP system and bank account database did not talk to each other, so the ERP didn't always know when a new account was added or an old account was deleted. Someone had to review line items on a daily basis to ensure the account structure was up to date and all our bank statements were coming in on time via SWIFT."

The cash operations group used Excel to track receipt of electronic bank statements. They extracted data using macros and VLOOKUP formulas. "We were trying to be more efficient by creating macros to run behind the scenes, but there was the potential for errors if data came through in a different format," Jafri says. "Invalid formats cause issues with VLOOKUP and require additional manual corrections."