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Bridging - Current Solutions & Workarounds

Tools & Systems

Cash Analytics

  • What it is: Treasury Management System for cash visibility and transaction management
  • How they use it: Manual input of transactions, no ERP integration
  • Limitations: Lacks drill-down capabilities, no variance analysis features, difficult to reclassify historical transactions
  • Used by: Euroports

Excel

  • What it is: Spreadsheet software
  • How they use it: Primary tool for bridging calculations - aggregate classified transactions, compare to budget EBITDA, derive working capital movements
  • Limitations: Manual, error-prone, no audit trail, doesn't scale
  • Used by: Euroports

ERP Systems

  • What it is: Enterprise resource planning systems (various)
  • How they use it: Source of GL accounts and budget data for classification
  • Limitations: Bookings only updated monthly, not useful for within-month analysis
  • Used by: Euroports

WorkDay ERP

  • What it is: Cloud-based ERP with detailed cost center, spend category, project data
  • How they use it: Source of transactional data with richer categorization than bank statements
  • Limitations: Granularity (cost center, project) not available in bank statement data
  • Used by: Personio

Adaptive

  • What it is: FP&A reporting system for budget/actual comparisons
  • How they use it: Final reporting to senior management, comparison against budget and rolling forecast
  • Limitations: Doesn't have transactional-level detail
  • Used by: Personio

The Basics (invoice upload tool)

  • What it is: Dutch tool used to upload AR invoices to the factor (ABN)
  • How they use it: Local entities upload invoices daily; tool filters what goes to ABN (netted against payments, excludes ineligible)
  • Limitations: One-way upload — doesn't give back customer-level confirmation of which invoices ABN accepted
  • Used by: Euroports

ABN Factor Portal

  • What it is: ABN AMRO factoring platform
  • How they use it: Daily invoice upload → accept/reject based on credit insurer (Atradius) limits and age (>90 days penalized) → daily payout
  • Limitations: Access typically for accounting only; no API for factoring division; customer-level data only visible inside platform; Matthias still waiting on access token after 3 months
  • Used by: Euroports

Anaplan (FP&A planning + bridge translation)

  • What it is: ON's FP&A platform — produces P&L, balance sheet, and a derived direct cash flow forecast through a hand-built translation layer (rules + maintained tables)
  • How they use it: FP&A plans P&L + BS structural items (sales, COGS, freight, customs) using accounting logic. Treasury (Lucia and predecessors) built the translation rules: assumption tables for AR aging splits, VAT timing, payment terms, plus calculations for items like the inventory→COGS→cash chain.
  • Limitations: Tables require constant maintenance and re-justification each cycle. The inventory→COGS detour is structurally complex. Translation logic isn't validated against reality — Lucia hasn't yet run variance analysis to check accuracy. FP&A doesn't actually use the cash-flow output (only P&L + BS). Lucia wants to replace the rule-based logic with Palm's model-driven inference and pitch the result back as official.
  • Used by: ON

Microsoft Dynamics (ERP)

  • What it is: ON's ERP — source of actuals (booked transactions)
  • How they use it: Feeds the data lake (BigQuery); Anaplan reads actuals from here
  • Limitations: N/A — not the bottleneck for ON
  • Used by: ON

BigQuery (data lake)

  • What it is: Central data lake at ON
  • How they use it: Hub for all financial data — Dynamics actuals, AR/AP tables, the long-term FP&A plan, and Palm output
  • Limitations: Palm currently has access only to the AR/AP table; full bidirectional connection (especially for the long-term plan) is the desired next step. Lucia framed Palm ↔ data lake as the architectural backbone of the "low-touch" treasury vision.
  • Used by: ON

Kyriba ("k") and Looker

  • What it is: Kyriba — treasury operations (payments, FX, repatriation). Looker — reporting layer fed by the data lake.
  • How they use it: Lucia's three-tool ecosystem: Palm (forecasting + categorization) + Kyriba (operations) + Looker (reporting). All other operations should disappear into the data lake.
  • Limitations: Mentioned only as the target architecture, not currently fully realized.
  • Used by: ON

Manual Workarounds

Excel Bridging Spreadsheets

  • What they do: Build custom Excel models to classify direct flows, assign GL accounts, aggregate, and compare to budget
  • Why: No tool provides integrated direct-to-indirect bridging with variance analysis
  • Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)

Chasing Local Entities for Explanations

  • What they do: Email/call local entity finance teams to understand variance drivers
  • Why: Centralized treasury can't see entity-level detail to explain movements
  • Source: Euroports (2025-10-27)

Manual FP&A-to-Weekly Splitting

  • What they do: Take FP&A monthly budget and manually split into weekly transactional forecasts
  • Why: FP&A provides monthly numbers but treasury needs weekly cash view
  • Source: Personio (2025-12-04)

GFC Rolling Forecast as Reference

  • What they do: Use FP&A's rolling monthly forecast (GFC) as more accurate reference than static budget
  • Why: Six-monthly budget becomes stale; GFC is updated monthly
  • Source: Personio (2025-12-04)

Excel Free-Text Commentary Box

  • What they do: Capture variance explanations per row in a free-text box inside the Excel bridge
  • Why: No tool-native commentary surface tied to variance rows
  • Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

Manual Target Overlays on Local Forecasts

  • What they do: Group treasury manually adds target overlays (e.g., +1M collections in March for Spain) to correct known-biased entity forecasts
  • Why: Local entities have systematic bias — AP overestimates payments, conservative entities match budget, some deflect
  • Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

PDF-to-Power-Query Pipeline for Factor Data

  • What they do: Run scripts / Power Query against ABN factor PDFs to extract structured data
  • Why: ABN factoring platform outputs PDFs; no API for the factoring division
  • Source: Euroports (2026-04-15)

Manual Anaplan Assumption Maintenance

  • What they do: Treasury manually maintains tables in Anaplan for AR aging splits per company (e.g., 70% within one month), VAT timing assumptions, and inventory turnover. Each forecast cycle, treasury reviews and re-justifies why each value is what it is.
  • Why: Anaplan's bridge translation is rule-based; tables capture company- or category-specific assumptions the rules need to convert P&L into cash. Without maintenance, the translation diverges from current payment behavior.
  • Source: ON (2026-04-29) — "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."

Excel/Anaplan Plausibility-Check Side-by-Side

  • What they do: Treasury opens Palm's forecast in one window and the long-term Anaplan plan in another (or pulls both into Excel) to gut-feel whether they tell the same story for the long-term horizon
  • Why: No automated bridge between Palm's bottom-up cash forecast and FP&A's top-down P&L plan; treasury needs the comparison as a "second tick in our head" before acting on the forecast
  • Source: ON (2026-04-29)