It is time to update and standardize cash reporting formats, according to a survey by the Association for Financial Professionals. 

It found that a vast majority of companies want to see the Banking Administration Institute (BAI) cash reporting format—which is used for everything from bank account information reporting to controlled disbursements to lockbox or receivables information reporting--standardized across banks. The format is used for current-day or previous-day information reporting from banks. 

The recent financial crisis has taught companies innumerable lessons, and one of the biggest is their reliance on banking partners—not just for funding but also for providing critical data needed to understand a company’s own liquidity and risk picture. As such, companies will become ever-more selective about their banking partners, and will expect more from those partners.

Even though sources of funding are unchanged, banks will be asked to be more proactive and entrepreneurial in their approach to service large corporate clients, according to a report from consultancy Celent.

Given the time and resources needed to manage complex treasury and finance systems, companies are increasingly choosing to have outside vendors manage their treasury software systems. But outsourcing management of treasury or finance systems comes with a unique set of risks that vendors are often hesitant to share with clients.

In a survey last year, consultancy Aite Group found that 66 percent of new treasury management system purchases made by companies were for vendor-hosted systems--where the software vendor, or a third party, manages the software on an outsourced basis, rather than the company managing the software in-house.

Risk management has never been more critical, and companies are changing the way they model risk in order to have a better understanding of where risk lies and how it can be reduced.

Over the course of the crisis—and throughout history—there have been countless instances of companies with poor risk management suffering the consequences. Energy producer Constellation, for example, announced in September 2008 that it had underestimated potential liabilities given a credit rating downgrade trigger. The company’s share price dropped almost 60 percent over three days, thanks to that announcement and its dependence on various credit lines from banks in deteriorating financial conditions.

This obviously is conspiracy theorizing at its worst, but it's hard not to scratch your head over the revision to the November report on durable goods orders that the Census Bureau quietly made on January 15.

Remember, the initial report of a 0.2 percent increase got major billing as a positive indication for the economy, even though the consensus expectation was for an 0.5 percent increase. As CNBC intoned, this was a sign of "a firmly entrenched economic recovery."

I've been waiting for someone to address the use of GDP to measure the economy in this fashion. It goes a long way to show why so much of the discussion of whether we're in a recession or not is completely and utterly beside the point.

As Richard Posner points out here, by the definition of a recession as it currently used, the Great Depression ended and began more than once, which of course is absurd on any terms other than statistical.

Just how safe is your company's data?

Seems that leaks of sensitive corporate information are at unnervingly high levels and the economic downturn may be partially to blame. According to a new study by Proofpoint, a Sunnyvale, Calif., email security consultant, 34% of survey respondents reported they had leaks of sensitive or embarrassing information in 2009, up from 23% the year before.