Cash Flow Forecasting and Liquidity Management: Lessons from Two Volatile Years

A new era for cash visibility

Always a core concern for corporate treasurers, the value of cash flow forecasting has been reinforced time and again over the past two years. After a period of unusually low interest rates and abundant liquidity, treasurers now face a world defined by persistent inflation, uneven rate cycles, and volatile funding markets.

For many firms, the comfortable surpluses of the early 2020s have given way to tighter cash positions and unpredictable cash movements, highlighting just how critical timely and accurate forecasts have become for strategic decision-making.

Automation continues to play a pivotal role in this shift – not only in improving the speed and accuracy of data gathering, but also in helping treasurers identify, mobilize, and optimize liquidity across multiple entities, systems, and geographies.

Liquidity challenges in a changed market

Over the past decade, many organizations accumulated substantial cash reserves during years of steady growth and ultra-low interest rates. That environment is gone.

Today’s treasurers must manage liquidity in a far more complex landscape, shaped by higher funding costs, geopolitical uncertainty, supply-chain disruptions, and volatile energy prices. Dividends, buybacks, and M&A activity have also drawn down corporate balances, while inflation and rate volatility have eroded predictability.

These pressures have forced treasurers to rethink cash visibility, forecasting, and short-term funding strategies. According to recent industry surveys, enhanced liquidity management and more accurate cash forecasting remain among the top two treasury priorities for 2025–2026.

The data challenge

The biggest obstacle to effective cash forecasting remains data fragmentation.

Treasury teams often need to consolidate inputs from:

• multiple bank accounts, sometimes in several currencies,
• treasury management systems (TMSs),
• ERP systems (accounts receivable, accounts payable), and
• other operational or payments platforms.

Assembling and assessing this data daily is essential but difficult, particularly when manual processes are still common. In many firms, spreadsheet-based workflows increase the risk of delay and error, potentially leading to funding shortfalls or costly emergency borrowing.

Automation and integration, therefore, are no longer optional – they are prerequisites for agility.

Navigating liquidity options

Sourcing short-term liquidity has also become more demanding.

Once-reliable bank partners are more selective, and market liquidity fluctuates rapidly. Treasurers need real-time visibility of market rates and funding options – not just through Bloomberg and Reuters, but across internal and bilateral arrangements with relationship banks, cash-pooling structures, and deposit accounts.

When information is siloed or delayed, treasurers risk missing opportunities to rebalance liquidity efficiently or arbitrage rates across accounts and markets.

To stay agile, firms increasingly rely on automated tools that connect directly with counterparties and streamline both data collection and transaction execution.

Improved visibility, enhanced actionability

While most major TMSs support some level of cash forecasting, few offer the cross-platform data integration needed for a real-time liquidity view. Many treasurers still rely on semi-manual or robotic workarounds that solve short-term needs but fail to deliver the unified perspective required in volatile markets.

OmniFi, SkySparc’s proprietary automation and data platform, was designed to bridge exactly this gap.

As a liquidity and forecasting solution, OmniFi offers:

1. Comprehensive data integration
   – Via open banking APIs, OmniFi automatically pulls data from banks, ERPs, TMSs, payment systems, and third-party platforms such as Snowflake – ensuring that all relevant cash data is instantly consolidated.‍
2. Automated liquidity sourcing
   – OmniFi automates data exchange with banks to aggregate rates across account types and can help identify optimal short-term funding mixes using smart algorithms and data-driven logic.‍
3. Continuous forecast validation
   – By comparing forecasted and actual cash flows week by week, OmniFi learns and improves accuracy over time, empowering treasurers to refine forecasting processes continuously.

Together, these capabilities make OmniFi an intelligent control center for real-time cash visibility, forecasting precision, and automated liquidity management.

Looking ahead: from insight to foresight

The events of recent years have shown that cash forecasting is no longer just a treasury reporting function – it’s a strategic decision-making capability.

In today’s environment of ongoing macroeconomic volatility and rising funding costs, treasurers need systems that not only collect and display data but also interpret, predict, and act on it.

According to Deloitte’s latest Global Treasury Survey, nearly 80% of treasury leaders expect cash flow forecasting to be fully or largely automated within the next two years.

OmniFi is built to deliver that vision – giving treasurers the clarity, confidence, and control needed to navigate uncertainty and position their organizations for long-term resilience.

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