Treasury teams of all sizes deal with the same core challenges: achieving visibility into cash flows, predicting future liquidity, and managing all their other responsibilities, usually with a very lean staff. For small to midsize organizations, these challenges are often magnified if the treasury staff uses manual and spreadsheet-based processes to manage growing and increasingly complex businesses. Automating and modernizing processes can make a huge difference in the efficiency of the team's treasury operations and their ability to serve as a strategic partner to the business.

"The size of the company does not dictate the complexity of the organization," explains Scott Carpenter, CFO of Post Falls, Idaho–based NWR, Inc. "Efficiency is just as important—maybe more important—for a company our size as for a Fortune 500 business. To move forward with this project, we had to have the right audience within the organization. But once we gained the support of management, we discovered that there are a lot of tools out there that can relieve treasury and finance teams of their manual workload."

Both of this year's Alexander Hamilton Award winners in the category Small Company Excellence leveraged process and technology improvements to launch transformational treasury initiatives despite having small treasury teams:

• NWR was growing fast, as it supplies refrigeration hardware to the rapidly expanding plasma collection industry. Carpenter and his colleagues realized that they needed to streamline legacy manual and spreadsheet-based processes so that treasury could keep up with the changes to the business. Their initiative resulted in much better visibility into cash flows and more staff time for value-added activities.
• German software company TeamViewer was also experiencing dramatic growth that made its inefficient treasury processes difficult for the two-person team to manage. The treasury team deployed a new online payment hub solution and connected it to the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Not only did this free up a great deal of staff time, but TeamViewer now has daily visibility into around 99 percent of its cash, vs. 33 percent a year ago.

Congratulations to TeamViewer and NWR for their outstanding initiatives! And thank you to the judges of our 2023 awards program: Jean-Francois Heitz, former deputy CFO and treasurer of Microsoft; Erik Smolders, former treasurer of Ingram Micro and a vice president in Deloitte's Global Treasury Advisory Services practice; Craig Jeffery, managing partner of Strategic Treasurer; Paul Galloway, senior adviser at Strategic Treasurer; and Marie Hollein, former president and CEO of Financial Executives International.