Fortune 500 companies account for two thirds of the Unites States’ gross domestic product, which totals nearly $18 trillion a year. These companies have a lot of bills to pay, so they naturally keep a lot of cash on hand. Have you ever wondered about the complexities of paying your bills at the Fortune 10 Companies, especially when your company has sometimes as many as 455 subsidiaries?
Walmart alone, which has 12 subsidiaries, would be the 28th largest economy in the world if it were a separate country, and it raked in $30 million in net cash in 2016 alone from operating activities. Managing that cash is no small feat- many large corporate entities have over 4000 separate banking accounts across their many subsidiaries. At the corporate level spreadsheets are generally used to calculate cash flow, but these can be cumbersome and are only updated weekly. There are better ways to keep track of corporate cash and financial standings.
Money management varies widely between startups and Fortune 10 companies, and the bigger a company gets the more complex its financial network becomes. Mergers and acquisitions also require a lot of capital in the form of cash on hand. AT&T has 45 billion customers and nearly 282,000 employees worldwide and is valued at almost $250 million. When it purchased DirecTV for $50 billion in 2015, it became the largest pay tv provider in the United States. Today AT&T has 27 different subsidiaries.
Corporations and their subsidiaries often have millions of dollars of capital flowing in and out, and keeping track of everything at the corporate level via spreadsheets that take hours to update and are only complete once a week is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Learn more about new cash flow management strategies from this infographic!
How Fortune 10 Companies Manage Their Cash
