Bridging - Pain Points & Challenges¶

Pain Points¶

Manual classification is time-consuming and error-prone - Treasury teams spend significant time classifying bank transactions into budget categories
Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)
Classification errors lead to "pollution of other categories" - One misclassified transaction corrupts multiple reports
Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)

Current tools lack drill-down and variance analysis capabilities - Cash Analytics doesn't support the analytical depth needed for bridging
Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)
Can't easily reclassify historical transactions - Requires support tickets to fix past errors
Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)

Bridging direct vs indirect forecasts is cumbersome - "A lot of time asking different local entities what does this mean"
Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)
ERP bookings only updated monthly - Not useful for within-month variance analysis
Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)
T+1 reporting takes hours of manual work - First day of month cash burn analysis is time-consuming
Source: Personio (2025-12-04)
No central hub for variance analysis - Each analysis done differently, no single source of truth
Source: Personio (2025-12-04)
Difficulty separating payroll and supplier payments - Look similar from bank statement data alone
Source: Personio (2025-12-04)
Manual splitting of FP&A monthly numbers into weekly forecasts - Tom manually converts monthly budget to weekly transactional forecasts
Source: Personio (2025-12-04)
Seasonal patterns not captured - E.g., January revenue spike from yearly subscribers not in AI forecast yet
Source: Personio (2025-12-04)

FP&A refreshes annually/quarterly, Treasury refreshes weekly - Creates end-of-period divergence that needs explaining
Source: Levi's (2025-12-11) - "FP&A does this in the beginning of the year or beginning of the quarter... It doesn't get refreshed until [next period]" - Dette
Source: Levi's (2025-12-11) - "It's when you come closer to the end of a period that you're so far apart because they haven't refreshed. And I have." - Dette
Acquisitions known to Treasury before FP&A budget reflects them - Treasury knows real acquisition cash impact 6-8 months ahead; FP&A uses placeholder numbers
Source: Levi's (2025-12-11) - "Once that engagement negotiations are on the table, I have a better number of what that acquisition looks like. They need to follow my number." - Dette

No ERP/BigQuery connection means long-term bridging is impossible — Can't bring in FP&A data to bridge indirect-to-direct. "If we want to start looking long term, we would also have to use the FP&A data."
Source: ON (2026-03-04)
Multiple ERPs complicate unified data ingestion — Terminals on Oracle, freight forwarding on InVision; no single source for AR/AP data
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15) — "probably it's going to be easier if you get the data directly from ABN" (the factor) than from the ERPs
AR/AP granular data not available for all entities — Immature entities can't provide the AR/AP feed required for proper working capital drill-down
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

Board deck manually rebuilt from Excel each quarter — "I cannot create a completely new revamped board deck; it needs to be similar to what we're seeing now" — copy tables, copy commentary into PowerPoint
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)
Free-text commentary box in Excel is the only variance explanation surface — "If that's not possible [in Palm], it would be me joining a Word doc or something"
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

Personal/role bias distorts local-entity forecasts — AP people overestimate payments ("they want to make those payments"); conservative entities like Finland just match budget; Spain deflects ("it's the business")
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15) — "Depending on who does a forecast, their personal bias influences that"
Manual target overlays required to correct systematic entity bias — Group treasury has to manually add targets (e.g., +1M collections in March for Spain) to fix known-biased forecasts
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

Factor payouts arrive as lump sums with no customer-level detail — Entity-level factoring % visible; can't tell which customers drove changes in factoring ratio
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15) — "Honestly, we don't" have customer-level factoring tracking
Factor data only available in PDFs requiring manual extraction — Power Query / scripts needed to get structured data out of factor reports
Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

Bridge translation rules in Anaplan are a mix of calculations and hand-maintained tables — Tables (AR aging splits per company, VAT timing assumptions, payment-term tables) require constant care; rules are more self-sustaining but the tables are the high-touch part
Source: ON (2026-04-29) — "Tables require a lot of maintenance from our site"
Each forecast cycle requires re-justifying assumption table values — "Every time that if I have to update this, I'm like, okay, why did we assume this again? And I have to review it all the time."
Source: ON (2026-04-29)
Inventory→COGS→cash chain is structurally complex — P&L recognizes COGS at the point of sale, but cash is paid for inventory bought earlier. Anaplan models this with an inventory-movement detour with payment-time tables. "Sophisticated is not necessarily something good here" — Lucia thinks Palm could replace this with statistical inference from sales patterns.
Source: ON (2026-04-29)

Black-box ML is a non-starter for finance audiences — Treasury (and especially controlling/FP&A) won't adopt Palm's numbers as official without seeing the reasoning
Source: ON (2026-04-29) — "I know it will be [a good replacement]. But you also need to build that trust." + "You're never going to trust a black box."
FP&A doesn't actually use the cash flow forecast — At ON, FP&A only uses P&L + balance sheet. The cash flow translation is treasury-maintained alone, which means the bridge work doesn't have FP&A buy-in by default.
Source: ON (2026-04-29) — "the reality is that FP&A doesn't really use cash flow forecasting. They just have the P&L and the balance sheet."
Manual plausibility check against the long-term plan is high-touch — Today's pre-bridge state: treasury sits in Excel/Anaplan checking how Palm's forecast compares to the long-term plan, gut-feeling whether they line up
Source: ON (2026-04-29) — "you're reducing an activity that is very high touch, which is us in an Excel taking there, or in Anaplan checking and seeing how the forecast compares to the long-term plan"

Conversations with controlling stall when treasury doesn't use their numbers — Long-horizon Palm forecasts that diverge from controlling's plan create friction: "you're not taking our numbers"
Source: ON (2026-04-29) — "It just creates friction in the conversation with controlling when they say, yeah, but you're not taking our numbers"
Regional forecasts persistently off, but treasury can't easily explain why — APEC region "always off because we grow faster than expected"; controlling challenges them on P&L but the forum lacks a cash-bridge angle
Source: ON (2026-04-29)