Cash position

The cash position shows how much cash the company has in its bank accounts today, and how that will change over the next few days as known payments and receipts happen. SAP's documentation describes it as information on the current financial situation in your bank accounts and bank clearing accounts. Treasury uses it every morning to decide whether to move, borrow or invest cash.

Where you read it

In SAP S/4HANA the app Cash Flow Analyzer shows the cash position, and SAP's documentation notes that you can choose between the cash position, the liquidity forecast and actual cash flows as the default report, or save your own variant. In basic cash management a version of the app is available too. Treasury users typically start with a view by bank account and day, then expand to company code and currency, and drill into the individual flows behind a number.

What makes up the position

The starting point is the bank balance from the latest imported statement. Added to it are movements already known but not yet on a statement: outgoing payments from the payment run sitting on clearing accounts, incoming payments posted but not yet confirmed, and memo records, manual entries for expected flows the system cannot see, such as a tax payment treasury knows is due Thursday. SAP's learning content lists memo records in the basic scope, with classic transactions FF63 and FF65.

Flow types

Every flow in cash management carries a flow type, which classifies what kind of cash movement it is: for example, a bank statement balance, an incoming payment, an outgoing payment, a supplier invoice, a customer invoice or a memo record. Flow types are what let the cash position separate actual bank data from expected flows, and group expected flows by source. In full scope, flows also carry liquidity items, which classify cash by business purpose (operating receipts, payroll, taxes, capital spending) for analysis and planning. SAP's business function documentation notes that liquidity items are not supported in basic cash management.

How flows are built from accounting documents matters too. SAP S/4HANA uses a flow builder to generate cash flows from journal entries, and in full scope operational data such as orders can be collected in One Exposure from Operations, a central store of cash-relevant information. When a flow looks wrong, the question is often whether the flow builder ran and classified the source document correctly.