The corporate treasury team at global biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb manages cash and cash equivalents in the billions of dollars (US$11.5 billion as of December 31, 2023) across more than 200 legal entities around the world. Efficient cash forecasting in this environment requires clear visibility into global accounts and as much automation as possible. Until recently, the forecasting process provided treasury with visibility into 99 percent of the company's accounts—but it was manual and cumbersome.

"We take two approaches to cash forecasting," explains Amy Szuting Chen, director of international treasury. "Treasury prepares a top-down, P&L [profit and loss]–driven multiyear forecast and a bottom-up forecast based on receipts and disbursements for the current year. For the bottom-up forecast, in each budget cycle—so, four times per year—treasury would collect data from our business partners, line by line. We would gather gross sales projections, as well as spending and payments, such as operating expenses and capex [capital expenditures] at the legal-entity level.

"The information for a standard bottom-up cash forecast was submitted by different teams, and not in a standard format," Chen continues. "Each business views their forecast differently, and there are variations in their methodologies. So the treasury team would have to consolidate all this data in Excel, which created a lot of manual work and took a month or more each quarter."