Tracking Investments: Treasury Management Software Solutions.

• Author: VIECELI, JEFFERY
• Position: Brief Article

Over the past few years, technology for treasury managers has advanced by leaps and bounds.

Software solutions now can help track, analyze, and report on investments, and some applications even allow finance officers to make investments on-line. This article presents some basic questions and answers regarding this trend.

Current Systems

How Do You Manage Your Government's Investment Portfolio? Most likely, you use an application like Excel or Lotus with a basic spreadsheet that was set up as a simple database to track investments. It probably includes such fields as trade date, amounts, interest rates, and so forth. In some cases, you may have all of your investments handled by an independent financial manager. There are also probably governments out there that still maintain a manual investment tracking system.

How Do You Perform Investment Analyses and Meet Reporting Requirements? This follow-up question may be more difficult to answer. While spreadsheets may be fine for simply tracking investment portfolios, there is something lacking when it comes to doing portfolio analysis and reporting. Although some spreadsheets and formulas may calculate earnings and return on investments, other analyses are probably not readily available. Reporting also is limited in scope and variety by spreadsheets.

Independent financial managers use customized computer applications to perform portfolio analyses and provide various reports. Although their analyses and reports are available, they certainly are not available on short notice, and one way or another, a fee is paid for the services provided by the financial manager.

As for those governments that are tracking their investment portfolios manually, they face many of the same obstacles as those using spreadsheets. It is difficult to perform portfolio analyses and provide reports within a short period of time.

Commercially Available Alternatives

There are several commercially available alternatives open to treasurers and finance officers who make investments and track portfolios for governments. These computer programs are designed to provide all of the functions necessary to make, track, analyze, and report on investments. While using a standard spreadsheet application like Excel or Lotus as a means of tracking an investment portfolio is an acceptable and affordable solution, these specialized software packages exist to...