Decision support for integrated cash management

Abstract

Cash management has attracted the increasing attention of both academicians and practitioners in recent time. The expanding role and responsibilities of cash managers and corporate treasurers is likely to increase the focus on cash management as a vital organizational function. Academic research, however, has primarily focused on providing analytical tools to solve well structured problems that are relatively isolated in nature. Conspicuously, no attempt has been made to integrate the various sub-problems of cash management explicitly recognizing interrelationships among the sub-problems as well as between the sub-problems and other financial decisions. More importantly, there is an even greater need to provide a framework that in addition to recognizing the above interrelationships will enable the cash manager to recognize a more inclusive set of dependencies that exist in practice. Decision support systems have the potential to overcome the above deficiencies to a significant extent. This paper is aimed at providing a conceptual framework for designing an effective model-based decision support system (DSS) for integrated cash management. The framework should form a useful basis for any attempts at designing computer-based support systems for cash management.