How has the treasury function changed over the past decade? 

Treasury has kept evolving, and the pace has accelerated significantly over the last ten years. Regulation, market volatility, technology shifts and geopolitical disruption have all forced us to adapt our systems, processes and organisation. A decade ago, the treasury team focused primarily on cash, foreign exchange and bank management. Traditional, straightforward work. Since then, I have watched more and more activities migrate toward treasury, which increasingly acts as a plug-and-play solution for anything the organisation cannot easily place elsewhere. Trade finance is a good example. We handle complex instruments such as bank guarantees, letters of credit, corporate guarantees and surety bonds. These instruments directly affect cash flow and generate significant risk, often misunderstood and underestimated by sales teams. Treasury has long been the risk management department, so absorbing this scope makes genuine sense. The same logic applies to order-to-cash, where assessing a customer's or supplier's financial stability before committing to payment terms is fundamental yet frequently overlooked in the rush to close deals. What is a sale worth if the customer never pays? These functions all interact with treasury whether we plan for it or not, and treasury naturally acts as a catalyst for change, proposing improvements with deep consequences for the broader organisation. 

"What is a sale worth if your customer doesn't pay you?" 

Why should accounts payable sit within the treasury department? 

For me, accounts payable is the most obvious function to merge with treasury, given its immediate impact on cash forecasting and liquidity management. The finger-pointing between both teams has gone on long enough. Duplicate payments, missing information in payment batches, processing delays, bank rejections, poor vendor database quality leading to errors and sometimes outright fraud. And who gets the blame every time? Treasury. When AP cannot determine whether an invoice can be paid due to insufficient cash visibility, when payment reconciliation fails, when liquidity prioritisation falls on the wrong desk, treasury steps in as the payment and bank connectivity expert. Both teams face the same internal challenges and are equally misunderstood. AP, like treasury, can be a genuinely strategic function. Strong static data governance, rigorous vendor onboarding controls, disciplined payment run planning, proper invoice coding and approval workflows, aging monitoring with proactive escalation, and serious investment in automation all transform AP from a back-office cost into an organisational asset. 

What should companies know about preparing for e-invoicing? 

Automation in AP follows the same logic treasury applied to payments years ago, moving from manual bank portal entries to fully automated file processing through a TMS. Tools such as robotic process automation and OCR technology now extract data from PDF invoices directly into the ERP, reducing manual keying and the errors that come with it. AI adds another layer, coding invoices to the correct expense type and financial dimensions with greater accuracy. Regulation is reinforcing this shift. By 2030, all EU countries must be capable of submitting and receiving invoices electronically, meaning dematerialised invoices integrate automatically into the ERP and AP teams redirect their energy toward analysis rather than data entry. If this is not yet on your roadmap or budget, the time to act is now. The agenda is tight, and solution providers are far from transparent. Running an RFP for an e-invoicing platform is considerably more complex than selecting a cash management system. Native ERP connectors, country-specific compliance coverage, data mapping responsibilities and implementation costs all require careful scrutiny. Providers have spotted a niche and priced accordingly. When calculating your return on investment, factor in the full automation gains and the time saved across the entire organisation, not just the licensing fee.