The 90 Percent Problem: Why Lean Treasury Teams Never Get to Strategy

Stacy Lassiter, who leads finance and treasury for Mobile County, Alabama, estimates he spends “probably 90% of [the] day tracking, measuring, and managing” to land on an end-of-day cash position. He does most of that work by hand: recording every deposit, recording every disbursement, then manually calculating where the day lands and what he projects for tomorrow.

That end-of-day cash position is the operational floor that strategic treasury work stands on. It comes due every morning. Until it’s done, forecasting, liquidity analysis, and decisions about idle balances are all pushed into whatever time is left.

Lassiter’s situation is common among government treasury leaders. When DebtBook’s Luke Otto polled finance professionals on the biggest barrier to advancing the treasury function, over 40% said their teams are stretched too thin. Retirements are thinning the bench further, so for most of those teams relief won't arrive as headcount. And where it does, the new hire inherits the same manual routine.

On lean treasury teams, capacity for strategy isn’t found or hired. It needs to be manufactured by automating the operational base first. Here’s where the 90% actually goes, why headcount can’t recover it, and what the workday looks like when the cash position builds itself.

The 90 Percent Problem, Defined

Cash management is the operational job. Forecasting and analysis are the higher-value ones. On a small team, both land on the same desk, so the operational half consumes the day and the planning work waits.

The daily work wins because it’s time-sensitive. "You can't wait until time goes forward. You gotta manage the business on a day-to-day basis," Lassiter says. A forecast can slip a week without anyone noticing. A missed disbursement can't.

The strategic work, when it happens, falls to a handful of people. "It's mostly me and the other department heads coming together and putting this stuff together," Lassiter says. "Everyone else is pretty much transactional."

The root problem described by Lassiter isn’t fixable through discipline or limited headcount. Operational and planning work sit on the same desk, and the urgent half sets the schedule. How that work is completed is the part you can change.

The Manual Work Behind a Daily Cash Position

Every day, someone assembles the cash position by hand across every bank, account, and fund. Nothing strategic starts until that number exists. The routine looks like this:

• Log into each bank and pull the day's bank balances
• Record every deposit and disbursement, the cash inflows and outflows, by fund
• Run the daily bank reconciliation so the bank data ties out against the books
• Calculate where the position lands, then project tomorrow

"We're just manually looking at everything that's done in a given day, recording all deposits, recording all disbursements, and manually calculating what our end-of-day cash flow is and what we project for the next day," Lassiter says.

Government cash carries inflows most corporate teams never handle, including tax receipts, grant revenue, and bond proceeds. Outflows span debt service, payroll, and vendor payments, all tracked by fund and stitched together in spreadsheets. A separate finding from a poll in the same session supports this: over 40% said they produce a daily position, but only by compiling it manually.

Daily cash positioning is the floor everything strategic stands on. Until the position is known, there's nothing to forecast from and no liquidity picture to act on. "If you don't measure it, you can't manage it," Lassiter says.

Why a New Hire Inherits the Same Problem

Nearly a third of all public finance workers are approaching retirement age, according to the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) and the analytics firm Lightcast. The people who know how your systems work are retiring faster than they're being replaced, and the labor market you'd hire from is shrinking too.

“Bench depth is what’s lacking,” explains GFOA’s Mike Mucha, “it’s not necessarily that local governments are struggling to replace the CFO.” On a two-person treasury team, there’s no one on the bench to sub in.

Hiring, where you can do it, still helps. But whoever you add starts the morning the same way you do, logging into bank portals, pulling balances, rebuilding the day's position by hand. A new hire doesn't change the process, they inherit the manual one that isn’t working.

Automate the Manual Work Before You Build the Strategy

Discipline alone won’t create more capacity for treasury teams, because the daily close reclaims the time. And you can’t reliably hire your way to it, because the new person inherits the same manual cash-positioning work.

That leaves automation. This is the pattern Otto hears constantly: “We have a lot of day-to-day operations, and I hear that all the time. We gotta keep the lights on. We gotta make sure everything is functioning, and then we’ll get to the strategic stuff.”

But there is never time for tactical work because keeping the lights on is a full-time job when the lights are wired by hand. And when Otto asked his audience to name the single biggest barrier to advancing the treasury function, capacity took the largest share of the vote. The solution: automate the operational base first, recover the hours it was taking, and build strategic capacity on what's left. Reverse the order, and the base stays manual while the purposeful planning hours get pulled straight back into operations.

The same pattern shows up outside government. In AFP’s 2025 Treasury Benchmarking Survey, automating manual processes ranked as the second most challenging task treasury faces, cited by 57% of respondents. The task that ranked first, at 62%, was cash and liquidity forecasting, which is the organizational work that never gets started.

“Hire more people” treats capacity as a headcount problem, when automating the base manual work treats it as the process problem it actually is.

What Automating the Daily Cash Position Looks Like

Automating the base means the bank data flows in on its own and the day's position is waiting for you. That's the version of the job Lassiter wants. "I really want to be in a position where I can push a button in the ERP system and get what a fund balance is in the book system and get what that same fund balance is in the bank system," he says.

Automating the daily cash position involves four steps.

1. Connect your banks: DebtBook Cash Management pulls balances and transactions straight from your banks through a secure API, so the data arrives without manual entry. This depends on bank connectivity. Large banks connect cleanly. A small community bank with no API still means a portal login. The first setup runs through your IT and banking-relationship approvals before any data flows.
2. Build the categorization rules once: The system then sorts transactions by purpose on its own, turning daily cash-flow analysis into a few clicks.
3. Open to a position that's already there: Because the data flows in and sorts itself, the day's cash position is ready in a few clicks rather than hours of spreadsheet work.
4. Get told when a balance drifts: Set a threshold per account, and the system flags any balance that drops below it, so monitoring liquidity stops meaning a login to every account.

Each step removes a piece of the manual base, including portal logins, transaction sorting, end-of-day math, and account-by-account balance checks described earlier. What's left is real-time visibility into the same position the team used to spend all morning building.

What the Reclaimed Time Lets You Do

Automating the base work creates time for the forecasting, analysis, and the cash decisions the team never had time to make. Lassiter's own goal is a rolling 13-week cash flow. Built on automated data, that forecast gets maintained as new information lands instead of rebuilt from a blank spreadsheet each quarter.

Here’s where the recovered hours actually land:

• Faster response when intergovernmental cash moves: A delayed grant still arrives late, but the forecast is quicker to correct once it does.
• Idle cash put to work: With a reliable forecast, balances can move into short-term investments inside the bounds your investment policy already sets. Without that visibility, staying conservative was the only safe option.
• Balances sized to the right horizon: Government cash splits across three tiers (daily liquidity, short-term investments, and long-term investments) and sizing each one depends on knowing what's available and for how long. Mobile County has already taken the version of that decision it can make without a forecast, reviewing its accounts for what they were earning and substantially raising the return on short-term investments. The tier above that, moving money out further with confidence, is what a working forecast unlocks.

This is the cash flow forecasting GFOA recommends, both to keep enough liquidity on hand and to limit idle cash earning nothing.

Strategy Work is Not Optional

The 90 percent problem is a sequencing problem, and that is the one variable a lean team fully controls. Automate the manual base first, and the same one or two people become the strategic function the organization already needs. In Mobile County terms, the cash position stops being a day-long manual build and is simply there each morning. The day opens on forecasting instead of data entry.

This week, time the single most manual step in your daily cash position, whether that’s pulling balances or categorizing transactions. The hours you win back when it disappears will show you the kind of strategic-capacity budget that’s possible through automation, and the number is almost always larger than you expect.

That capacity potential, not a job posting, is where strategic treasury actually starts.

When you’re ready to see it on your own accounts, schedule a demo of DebtBook.

Related Cash Management Reading

• How to Prevent Fraudulent Transactions in Treasury Operations
• How Cash Forecasting Boosts Creditworthiness & Lowers Borrowing Costs
• [FREE DOWNLOAD] Cash Position Worksheet for Treasury

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