In a company, the answer to the question of where the money is usually does not sit in one place. The current account balance is in the accounting package, but when each customer's payment falls due is in the sales team's head. The cheque portfolio is kept in a separate ledger or in a drawer; which cheque is to be presented for collection and when is left to memory. Bank movements are checked at the end of the day from the online branch, and expense receipts are gathered at the end of the month. The weekly cash table is usually an Excel file prepared by one person, whose formulas break a little more every month. This scattering works at a small scale; it stops working when payment traffic grows and the number of due dates multiplies. The problem is not that the accounts are kept wrongly. The accounting record writes the past correctly, but it does not show the next three weeks.
The most common decision taken at this point is to change the accounting package, and it is usually the wrong one. Logo, Mikro, Netsis and similar packages are systems that have settled over years on the statutory ledger, tax return, e-invoice and e-ledger side, and that are updated as legislation changes. Rewriting that area is both unnecessary and risky; we do not write it and we do not propose a product to take its place. What we build is a financial management layer that runs alongside your existing accounting package. The source record stays in accounting; current account, invoice and bank data are read from there, and the processes the package often does not carry well enough are added on top — due dates, promises to pay, risk limits, expense approval and cash projections. The records produced in this layer are written back to accounting.
The name for this layer in the literature is FMS, the financial management system. A close term, FRM, means financial risk management and describes the measurement and limiting of currency, interest rate, maturity and counterparty risk. In practice the two are intertwined: placing a risk limit on a customer, monitoring open foreign-currency receivables and seeing a maturity mismatch are FRM subjects, but they live on the same screens. We build FMS in its broad sense and add the FRM side only to the extent of the risk the company actually carries. In an exporting company, currency and letter-of-credit tracking makes sense; in a company working only for the domestic market the same screens stay empty and go unused. Narrowing the scope to the risk actually carried is the most useful decision in this work.
Let us write the limits up front. This layer does not do your accountant's job: it does not file tax returns, does not keep statutory ledgers and is not responsible for the tax correctness of an accounting entry. On the e-invoice and e-ledger side, whatever your private integrator or accounting package does today it carries on doing; we connect to those flows, we do not take their place. And no software collects an uncollectable receivable; what the system does is keep the overdue receivable and the promise to pay visible, and take the uncertainty out of who should be calling. When the expectation is set here, the project works. And we always start the work on site: scope is not written before the existing accounting package, the number of banks, the cheque volume and the work done by hand at month-end have been seen in place.