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.

Turn the checklist into a scoreable workbook

A checklist you tick is a start; a checklist you can trace and score is a selection tool. Give every surviving requirement a row with these columns — then the same rows carry all the way into the demo scorecard and, later, UAT:

The payoff is traceability: every requirement line has an ID that flows into the vendor demo scorecard and then into UAT, so "does it meet our needs?" is answered by evidence against IDs, not by which demo felt best.

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, product decision or build lesson every two weeks.