If your company maintained 2 or 3 banks for payment processing, we have to modify a little bit of the technique so that we can control effectively all the bank’s accounts and at the same time manage to earn extra income by carefully invest surplus fund in short term investment. Lets assume that your company has 3 bank accounts and we name it as Bank A, Bank B and Bank C. We should choose one bank as your major bank where you pool all your cash in that bank. Let’s assume that our major bank is Bank B. That means all your major collections must be deposited into this bank account. Your major payment which comprise big amount such as subcontractors and salary payment must also from this cash pool account.
Any payment prepared which is small in amount but the rate of recurrence is high such as utilities bills payment, petty cash reimbursement, staff claim and other payment should be prepared by using Bank A. We will deposited the incoming cheques into Bank A with more or less the same amount of cheques prepared so that the account balance in Bank A is always in ideal balance.
If we have specific payment pattern for the month, for example we only pay for our suppliers and workshop every 25th of the month, then we use Bank C for our cheque payment. Here we use ZBA technique which means Zero Balance Accounts technique where we will only transfer fund from our cash pool account which is Bank B to Bank C only once a month. That means there is no extra cash in Bank C, which means we have pool all extra cash in Bank B for our short term investment purposes. I will explain further the topic of short term investment when we reach to that topic soon.
All the suggested techniques above looks complicated but the reason behind that is we manage to prepare daily cash position more faster and accurate without spending your time to figure out the serial number for every categories if we use one bank only. From our example above, you will notice that bank A is for bills payment, staff claims and other payment. That means you only have to identify 3 series of serial cheque numbers for the payment using Bank A. Bank B only has 2 payments which is subcontractors and salary while Bank C meant for suppliers and workshop payment. The second reason of doing that is to avoid idle balance in Bank A and Bank C which do not earn any interest income. All our income has been pooled in Bank B where we can place short term investment placement from tenor of overnight to one week.
To reach our bank balance for that day, we just calculate by simply using simple arithmetic which is Opening Balance + Incoming Cheques – Payment made = Closing Balance. When place all the bank column side by side, we manage to get the total closing balance when we total up Bank A,Bank B and Bank C closing balance. This is what I call the cash dashboard where we can see all our bank balance with only one glance. Of course it is not complete yet because we still have not taken into consideration the available balance and cash & cash equivalent figure. I will explain in depth all this terminology later.