Cash management worries

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The overwhelming amount of, well, things that can happen nowadays is complicating how CFOs manage their cash. One could say, the simulation is glitching.

In business consultancy Protiviti’s 2026 Global Finance Trends Survey of 902 finance executives in Q2, cash management was a high priority; 78% of respondents said it was a top focus over the prior three months amid a volatile economic environment.

It’s not that conducting a cash forecast has gotten more difficult, West Monroe Managing Director and Partner of Finance Transformation Connor Augustyn told us; “it’s more of the information that’s feeding those cash forecasts itself.”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily because CFOs have suddenly become concerned that they’re going to run out of cash at all; I don’t think that’s a problem. I think the range of potential outcomes that impact cash has started to widen,” Augustyn told CFO Brew.

As an example, Augustyn cited AI “token costs, and the variability that I may now have to pay an invoice unexpectedly of $150,000 that nobody knew about. You have uncertainty also around demand, macroeconomic things like tariffs and input costs, customer payment behaviors, interest rate changes—all of these things ultimately flow through to cash.” The question that CFOs are asking is “not simply, ‘How much cash do I have today and when is the cash going to run out?’ It’s “How quickly could that position change?’” Augustyn said.

A crystal ball. “A company can have a very sophisticated 13-week cash flow model” that has worked well for some time, Augustyn said. But in areas like receivables, where decisions are made based on when a customer usually pays, delayed payments, or earlier procurements due to tariff fears, may render that forecast moot.

Yet further complicating the model isn’t necessarily the answer, Augustyn warned. It’s more about “shortening the distance between what’s happening operationally, and what finance actually knows about, and can predict.”

“The problem is that finance and the office of the CFO often don’t see [issues] until they’ve already started affecting the actual numbers,” he added.

Breaking points. Seeing into the future, or predictability, then, is the magic to stabilizing cash flows right now. “That is fundamentally the harder question to manage,” Augustyn said.

And we know you’re all shocked to hear it, but AI can help boost those predictions.

“The predictability, that’s where we’ve started to see AI take its most impactful place within cash forecasting, using that financial forecasting engine to be able to say, ‘Can AI tell me what assumptions underlying in my cash forecast are starting to break?’” Augustyn said.

Examples of such breakage? “I’m starting to see a trend where these customers are shifting their payment terms,” or “I’m starting to see a trend where every time that…the news drops about potential tariffs, my procurement team goes out and does major buys because they’re scared about potential tariffs coming,” Augustyn said.

Augustyn said that along with deploying AI to help increase cash flow visibility, CFOs should use cash as a jumping-off point to “create [a] cross-organizational discussion.”

“That is what we’re starting to see, is use cash as the other impetus to get yourself involved in a lot of the operational decisions. But fundamentally, these variable inputs, and how quickly these inputs can change, that is where there’s a lot of impact and influence in AI’s ability to do that faster,” he concluded.