The request almost always comes from outside. An auditor, a newly appointed board of statutory auditors or a financial adviser asks to see the cash plan for the next twelve months. In many companies that plan exists, but it lives in a spreadsheet updated when there is time, fed by hand by one person, with no trace of how the numbers were built. That is the moment when adequate organisational structures stop being a regulatory phrase and become an operational problem, and treasury is the first place it shows.
In practice, the subject comes up in conversations with accountants and financial advisers with a frequency that surprises anyone who still considers it a large-company matter. The obligation does not depend on a size threshold: it has to be applied in proportion to the nature and the scale of the business.
The obligation under article 2086 is not discharged with a document
Article 2086 of the Italian Civil Code requires an entrepreneur operating in corporate or collective form to put in place organisational, administrative and accounting structures appropriate to the nature and scale of the business, including for the timely detection of distress. The Italian Business Crisis and Insolvency Code made that duty operational, tying it to the ability to pick up the signals early and to act. The European framework behind it is the Directive on preventive restructuring frameworks published on EUR-Lex, which introduced the early warning principle into the law of the member states.
The practical consequence, however, is underrated: an appropriate structure is not a document to produce, it is a process that generates current data at regular intervals. For instance, a well-written report on a control model nobody feeds does not describe an appropriate structure, it describes an intention. The process is assessed, not declared. The difference becomes obvious the moment somebody asks where a number came from and the answer takes three days.
Do adequate organisational structures require treasury software?
A structured treasury function produces current cash forecasts, continuous monitoring of distress indicators and traceability of transactions, which are the operational conditions the rules call for.
The contribution concentrates on three verifiable points. First of all, there is cash planning over at least twelve months. That is the window against which debt sustainability is assessed. Secondly, there is the calculation of the indicators: DSCR, net financial position, debt analysis, the measures the rules ask companies to monitor. The more complete treasury platforms allow these to be built as configurable formulas. Bank movements and the ageing report feed them, instead of being copied across from a quarterly balance sheet. Finally, there is continuity. An indicator calculated once a year picks up little, whereas one that refreshes as movements arrive catches the imbalance while it is forming. Continuity is the criterion that separates a live structure from a formal one.
Operational oversight, in short, is what the tool contributes. The legal characterisation of the obligations, and the decisions that follow from it, remain the province of the professionals advising the governing body, and the two work better when the data under discussion is the same.
Adequate organisational structures and segregation of payment duties
Segregation of duties in payments is the most concrete request coming from companies with formalised internal control procedures, and the easiest to verify in a demo. The mechanism is straightforward: one person prepares the payment batch, another authorises it, and the system prevents both functions falling to the same user.
In addition, mature treasury systems handle this flow with multiple approval levels, thresholds by amount and confirmation through a second factor. In conversations with finance directors the recurring formulation is dual signature paired with a one-time code: a scheme anyone who has worked with a bank has known for years and which, inside the company, often does not yet exist. The principle is old and still sound.
Above all, the benefit is not only control. A traced authorisation process automatically produces the evidence of how the company reached a payment decision. That evidence is exactly what an auditor looks for when assessing whether the administrative structure is appropriate, and it belongs squarely within adequate organisational structures.
Adequate organisational structures: the bank pack and the auditors’ pack coincide
As a result, many companies build inside the treasury platform a dashboard with the indicators lenders ask for when assessing creditworthiness, exportable before the meeting at the bank. The effect on timing is concrete: much of the required data is already organised, and the conversation moves from gathering figures to discussing terms.
Forward profit and loss or business plan: appropriate structures in practice
On the lending side it is worth separating two requests that often get confused. The difference matters. On one hand, a bank asks for a forward profit and loss account and the sustainability ratios, and treasury produces those. On the other hand, when it asks for a genuine business plan, with the commercial and industrial assumptions underneath the numbers, the platform organises the data and building the assumptions remains financial work. Knowing in advance which of the two is being asked for avoids turning up with the wrong document.
A case from the field
A company working with a statutory auditor had oversight that was formally in place and substantially blind: the cash forecast had gaps and a significant share of receivables was stuck on positions nobody was working systematically. What analysis turned up was not about the forecast. Nobody had separated the person raising payments from the person authorising them, and without that separation the structure was indefensible whatever the quality of the numbers.
In this case the treasury platform brought in the account movements and the ageing report. The twelve-month plan became a document that updates itself. Meanwhile, payment batches gained a second authorisation level and the distress indicators became formulas calculated on current data. The pack for the bank became an export rather than a project. The stuck positions moved into a collections sequence, a subject developed in the article on credit management and average payment delay.
Appropriate structures: scenarios are for deciding beforehand
Adequate organisational structures do not only ask a company to measure the present. What-if simulation is the function finance directors cite with most conviction, and it has a distinctly untechnical merit: it allows a decision to be argued before it is taken. The scenario works as a separate worksheet, where a delay in collections from a significant customer or the purchase of a machine can be assumed and the effect on cash observed without touching the official forecast. A scenario commits nothing.
Therefore, comparing a base scenario against an alternative is the step that turns a discussion of opinions into a discussion of numbers. Anyone who has already built a dependable cash forecast starts from solid ground: the subject is covered in the article on the five fatal mistakes of managing treasury in Excel.
Adequate organisational structures: which roles to involve
During scoping conversations, however, the question that carries most weight is not about the software: it is about who will use it every day. A treasury project with a sponsor in senior management and no daily operational owner produces a dashboard that goes stale in three weeks.
| Role | What it owns | What it needs from the project |
|---|---|---|
| Finance administration and day-to-day treasury | Daily reconciliations, entering forecasts, payment batches | Clear categorisation rules and less re-keying |
| Management and finance director | Decisions on liquidity, borrowing, investment | Current indicators and comparable scenarios |
| Internal IT | Connections to banks and ERP, users and permissions | Defined data structures and a verified integration perimeter |
| Control body and external advisers | Appropriateness of the structure, reading the ratios | Data with a traceable origin |
In the treasury projects Aesir Srl runs, mapping these four roles comes before choosing the platform, because it determines which integrations are genuinely needed and which stay ornamental.
On the ERP side the door stays open: Aesir is Gold Partner of NTS Informatica for Business Experience, and with other systems we use the connectors available or build them. The platforms we select process data in datacentres within the European Union, with certifications from the ISO/IEC 27001 family and requirements aligned with NIS2: the same standards applied to the Aesir infrastructure, which operates Tier IV datacentres in the EU with replication. We run projects throughout Italy and, on specific request, in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
What treasury oversight has to produce
Seven things to ask of anyone proposing a path towards adequate organisational structures, whichever platform is involved:
- A cash plan covering at least twelve months, updated from movements rather than re-keyed.
- Distress indicators calculated as formulas on current data, with the source of each component stated.
- A payment authorisation flow with at least two levels, recording who raised and who approved.
- A reconciliation history that allows a balance to be reconstructed.
- An exportable document pack for the bank, carrying the ratios lenders ask for.
- The ability to build alternative scenarios without altering the official forecast.
- A named owner: who updates, how often, and who reads the result.
Finally, the last item decides the outcome. The first six can be bought, the seventh has to be organised.
Frequently asked questions
Do adequate organisational structures apply to small companies too?
The obligation is proportionate to the nature and scale of the business, and within that proportion the small company has its place. Appropriate oversight for a company of modest size is lighter, not absent: a current cash plan and a couple of ratios monitored regularly cover a good deal of ground.
Is a twelve-month forecast enough to call the structure appropriate?
It is an important piece and not the only one. Alongside the forecast come traceability of data, separation of duties on sensitive transactions and regularity of updating, because appropriateness is judged on the process rather than on a single document.
How long before the indicators become reliable?
Balance-sheet structure ratios are readable as soon as the accounts are connected and the ageing report is aligned. Indicators that depend on behaviour, such as average collection times, settle once the platform has accumulated a few cycles of reconciled movements.
Can the auditors access the platform directly?
Treasury platforms handle profiles with differentiated permissions, and a read-only profile for the control body or an external adviser is an ordinary configuration. It is worth defining at go-live, together with the perimeter of data they can see.
Let’s talk
Adequate organisational structures turn into a box-ticking exercise every time they are approached as a report to produce. Instead, they become an advantage when a company notices that the data the rules ask for is the same data needed to decide: cash over the next twelve months, debt sustainability, the effect of an investment, the behaviour of customers who pay late. The question to start from is blunt and useful: how long does it take today to answer, with a defensible number, what the cash balance will be in six months. The length of that answer describes the structure better than any report. If you would like to explore the subject or assess the situation in your own company, you can fill in the form at the bottom of this page or write to support@aesir-tech.it: we will arrange a free consultation and start from your numbers.