The ERR NOT™ Method

Before you evaluate any products, you should understand the current marketplace and its segments and determine which one(s) best fits your needs.

Real Treasury divides the cash and treasury management system marketplace into three segments: Cash Tools, TMS-Lite and TRMS. See what defines each segment.

Understanding the marketplace is the step that prevents you from spending three months evaluating products that were never a good fit in the first place. If you are actively evaluating products from all three segments, then you likely don’t have a clear handle on your requirements.

Education also means getting a clear understanding of your treasury operations and where the opportunities for improvement lie. Clarity around where your treasury operations are on the continuum of simple to complex is also needed; it points directly to which segment(s) is likely the best-fit.

Large multibillion-dollar companies can have fairly simple treasuries. Conversely, small “mid-market” companies can have very complex operations. So, complexity isn’t about size nor revenue.

Are you mainly focused on cash? Do you trade in several different asset classes (investments, debt, FX, derivatives, commodities)? Do you have many different banking partners and counterparties? Do you have multiple ERPs and many different entities? All these things add complexity. A ‘simple’ tool won’t handle complexity well, and a complex tool can make what should be easy more difficult.

This is not a new concept, but it’s one that gets skipped or rushed all too often. Without a written, prioritized list of requirements, your selection will be based on looks, salesperson expertise, buzzwords, familiarity and more, but not on functional fit.

Real Treasury works with clients to translate goals and needs into written prioritized requirements (and phased when appropriate) so that we have a guidepost by which everything is measured. This is what stops the sales team’s likeability from influencing a decision. Or a team from just choosing “the name you know” or the product used at a team member’s last company “just because.” Requirements also stop the team from chasing the latest buzzwords (agentic AI, MCP servers, AI-native) if those technologies don’t add value towards meeting your high-priority requirements.

Written requirements also create accountability. When the winner is selected, you can clearly explain the rationale. You’ll have a clear, defensible answer when stakeholders later ask, “Why didn’t we choose Vendor B?”

We do not recommend the traditional RFP. Not even the AFP’s standard RFP template, sorry. As we’ve already established, bloated RFPs produce many “yes” answers, not meaningful differentiation.

Instead, Real Treasury creates a custom Request for Information (RFI) for each client, a short, pointed list of questions to gather the needed non-functional information such as company background, support model, recommended modules given your requirements, and indicative pricing.

The goal is to continue to narrow the field intelligently by identifying vendors that are far outside of your budget or clearly weak in key areas. Scripted demo time should be spent on vendors who can meet your must-have requirements and many of your like-to-haves, as well.

Functional fit is best determined in the next stage of scripted demos.

This is the most powerful step in the ERR NOT™ process, and one of the most underused strategies in treasury technology selection. Consulting firms take different approaches to this step using a cookie-cutter script that is not truly tailored to each individual client, so watch out!

Real Treasury writes a custom demo script for each client. Every vendor must demo the same scenarios, in the same order, using a subset of your actual data and transactions where possible. You get an apples-to-apples comparison. Without a script, a demo can be nothing but the flashiest, best-looking parts of the product, which are the equivalent of movie trailers, nothing but the very best moments in the movie.

With a script, you can get a much better feel for how the product will work for you, your workflows, and your financial instruments, as well as what it will take for you to maintain the system after implementation.

Make sure you have your list of requirements in front of you while you write your script. They should be the basis of the script you produce.

From Tracey Knight, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant

I spent over 20 years as a solution consultant (the position was called numerous things over the years, solutions engineer, treasury consultant, product specialist, etc., even Demo Woman) across multiple TMS platforms. I know how vendors make products look easy and simple in the controlled environment of a demo. And I know which questions to ask to pull back the curtain when too much advance work has been done to really illustrate a realistic workflow for the client. We advocate for our clients during demos, asking the tough questions that most buyers wouldn’t know to ask.

This aspect of what we do is hard for a treasury team to replicate without the direct experience of having delivered many demos. So, my advice is that if you have a question, ask it. If the answer seems too glib, ask more. Better than just asking for a verbal answer, ask the demo person to SHOW you the answer in the product.

Using a demo script is how you can stop getting distracted by bells and whistles and focus on your requirements. By doing so, you can uncover the weaknesses of a product (not just its strengths) and avoid being “surprised” during implementation.

When you use the traditional scorecard approach to “grading” demos, you often end up with several products with average scores that are very close to each other. That happens because you often have too many people voting (from other departments who are only focused on one area instead of the fit of the entire system). Should accounting get an equal vote when they will benefit, but not be very involved with the product on a daily basis? And what happens when there are virtual ties in the results? More often than not, teams end up going with a ‘gut’ feel because their selection process doesn’t lend itself to one clear and objective winner. If you can’t clearly articulate why Vendor A beat Vendor B, you’re not done, no matter how many demos you watched.

Our method ERR NOT™ uses a structured post-demo ranking process that produces a winner (and the backup) through objective and defensible means. The process is designed to make the best-fit vendor obvious.

Follow these best practices:

• Schedule your final demos close together (on the same day or in the same week) so that you aren’t relying on memory from last week or last month.
• Take good notes, but don’t focus so much on the notes that you aren’t paying attention to the presentation (this is getting easier every day with the help of AI notetakers).
• Focus on your requirements when evaluating TMS systems. Don’t let some of the common errors we talk about allow you to get off track and just “pick one” in an illogical manner.

After you make the selection, the next potential problem is to mess up the implementation. And the single biggest reason you might select the best-fit system and still not get the improvements or ROI you had calculated is this: automation does not bring about improvement all by itself; it simply makes things faster. But “faster” is not “better.”

Although implementation teams, either the vendor’s or a third party, will tell you that they are treasury experts and will help you transform your operations, in reality, they are incentivized to quickly get you up and running and “live.” Often the teams are staffed with people who’ve never been a practitioner and don’t truly understand your day-to-day job. Can they really help you make things better, not just faster?

Better is the goal of the Transformation step in ERR NOT™. Having an objective third party, unassociated with the technical delivery team, makes all the difference. This is often a practice in implementations of larger software packages like ERPs, but is less common with TMS. The need for it, however, is just as great. Projects fail to complete and don’t realize promised ROI.

It helps to have an advocate working for you during the implementation to perform: unbiased auditing, early risk mitigation, vendor accountability, Go-Live validation, and to recommend better/best practices to take full advantage of the new technology.

Remember, many of your existing processes (if you are using spreadsheets) are built specifically for the manual process; those should not automatically be duplicated. Instead, processes can often be eliminated or optimized to take full advantage of the new technology. That is what a consultant can provide, but not the consultant doing the technical implementation.

Selecting a TMS should not come down to the best demo, the best-known name, or the vendor that checks the most boxes on an RFP. From education through transformation, ERR NOT™ is designed to help you understand the market, define what you truly need, compare the right vendors on a level playing field, and make a decision you can clearly defend.

With a better selection process, you can dramatically improve the odds that the technology you choose will deliver the results you expect.