Treasury Management System Requirements Checklist

A good TMS requirements checklist covers six functional areas — cash and liquidity, bank connectivity, payments, financial risk, accounting and compliance, and reporting — plus the non-functional requirements (integration, security, data, deployment, support) that teams routinely forget. But the checklist below is only useful if every line traces back to a real need and is prioritized must / should / could. A requirements list copied from a vendor's feature grid is worse than no list at all.

Use this as a starting point, delete what doesn't apply, and add the two or three things unique to your business that no generic list would contain.

Start from your problem, not a feature list

Before the checklist, write down the questions you can't answer today and the decisions they block — "we can't see group cash intraday," "we can't prove who approved a payment," "our forecast is one person's spreadsheet." Those become your must-haves and your success criteria. Everything on the list below is a prompt; your business need is what makes an item a requirement.

The requirements checklist

Cash & liquidity management

• Automatic import and consolidation of balances and transactions from all banks
• Intraday and end-of-day cash positioning across entities and currencies
• Cash flow forecasting (multiple horizons and granularities)
• Actual-vs-forecast variance tracking and forecast-accuracy measurement
• Cash pooling support (physical / notional; zero / target balancing)
• Intercompany positions and internal funding visibility

Bank connectivity

• Statement import in your banks' formats (MT940, camt.053, BAI2)
• Payment file generation in required formats (pain.001 / ISO 20022, local formats)
• Connectivity channels you need (SWIFT, host-to-host, EBICS, API)
• Bank onboarding support and pre-built bank connectors
• Acknowledgement / status handling (pain.002) and end-to-end payment tracking
• Coverage for all your current banks — and easy addition of new ones

Payments

• Centralized payment initiation (payment factory) if required
• Configurable approval workflows and limits
• Segregation of duties enforced in the workflow
• Sanction / compliance screening or integration to a screening tool
• Payment templates, recurring payments and bulk handling
• Full, exportable audit trail of who approved what, when

Financial risk management

• FX exposure capture, valuation and reporting
• Interest-rate (and, if relevant, commodity) exposure and instruments
• Deal capture for hedges and instruments; lifecycle management
• Limit monitoring and breach alerts
• Hedge accounting support (IFRS 9 / your standard)
• Debt and investment portfolio tracking (schedules, interest, covenants)

Accounting & compliance

• Automated accounting entries and posting back to the ERP/GL
• Reconciliation of treasury sub-ledger to the GL
• Support for your reporting standards and audit requirements
• Configurable controls, approvals and change logging
• Data retention and auditability that satisfies your auditors

Reporting & analytics

• Standard treasury dashboards (position, forecast, exposure, debt)
• Configurable / ad-hoc reporting without vendor dependency
• Board- and CFO-ready reporting outputs
• Data export and, if needed, a data feed to your BI / warehouse
• Drill-down from a number to its source (provenance)

Non-functional (the part teams forget)

• Integration — clean interfaces to your ERP and any middleware; documented APIs
• Security — SSO, role-based access, segregation of duties, encryption
• Data — master-data model, migration support, data quality tooling
• Availability & performance — SLAs, uptime, response times at your volumes
• Deployment — SaaS vs on-prem; hosting, region, data residency
• Vendor — implementation approach, support model, roadmap, references, viability

How to prioritize: must / should / could

Tag every surviving requirement:

• Must — the system is genuinely unusable for you without it. Keep this list short; if half your requirements are "must," none of them are.
• Should — important, but there's a workaround you could live with for a while.
• Could — nice to have; a tiebreaker at most.

This is what lets you compare vendors on what matters to you rather than on who has the longest feature list.

What usually goes wrong

• Gold-plating. A 300-line wish list where everything is "must." It can't be prioritized, so vendors optimize for feature-count and you can't tell them apart.
• Copying a vendor's grid. You inherit their framing and their strengths, and you miss the requirements specific to your business.
• Ignoring the non-functional. Integration, data, security and support decide whether the implementation succeeds — and they're the lines checklists skip.
• No traceability. Requirements no one can tie back to a business need; you can't defend them, and they bloat the evaluation.

Using this in selection

A prioritized, business-anchored checklist becomes the backbone of your RFP and your vendor scorecard: each requirement is a scored line, weighted by must / should / could. That turns "which demo impressed us?" into "which system best meets the needs we actually have?" — the whole point of doing this properly.

Part of the Treasury Management Systems guide. See also TMS vs ERP vs spreadsheets and when you need a TMS. The newsletter sends one finance-systems pattern every two weeks.