Recap & Recording: Master Cash Forecasting: Gain Confidence, Clarity & Control

Our panel explored why reliable cash forecasting is central to effective treasury, supporting financing, liquidity management, and strategic decision-making. Forecasting also strengthens the connection between treasury and the wider business, reveals working-capital opportunities, and provides stakeholders such as banks and private equity with timely, actionable insights.

Speakers discussed practical methodologies – top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid – alongside the importance of operational rigor and clear accountability. They emphasized that clean historical data, defined process ownership, and thoughtful human interpretation (especially when using AI) are essential to improving forecast accuracy and driving business impact.

• Drive behavioral change by making forecasts discussable metrics: regular variance review increases accountability and improves numbers over time. “I think the whole ownership of the figures and the engagement and the accountability increases by bringing all of it down to the business itself.” — Ronald van Meenen

• Prioritize directional accuracy and trend understanding over false precision; trends guide decisions more reliably than an overconfident single number. “Directional accuracy of your forecast and the trend carries a lot more weight than just a false, precise number that you have in your forecast.” — Tim Ramlugaan

• Improve data hygiene first—historical transactions and clean ledgers unlock trend analysis before trying to refine precision. “Clean data is exactly where a good forecast starts, because if you feed an AI model dirty data, it will just make you wrong faster.” — Tim Ramlugaan

• Automate repetitive work to free time for analysis, but keep transparency and explainability: avoid AI black boxes and ensure humans can interrogate outputs. “Any use of AI should enhance the human value by eliminating the manual tasks… but it is about elevating insights for human engagement.” — Neal Cooper

• Use a hybrid approach for most organizations: central control for consistency, local input for realism and ownership. “It’s the only way to trust the data that you’re getting, and it has to be reviewed by both parties as well.” — Tim Ramlugaan

• Embed forecasting in regular governance: weekly operational reviews, monthly performance checks and quarterly directional resets keep forecasts trusted and actionable. “By improving the accuracy of the forecast… we are now seeing the analysis coming out to pinpoint where these inaccuracies lie.” — Neal Cooper