Why I Created SLOS — Part 4: Why Not Just Buy a TMS?

Not every business needs a treasury team. Not every business needs a TMS. SLOS is not another TMS, an accounting system, or a forecasting tool. It's a cash liquidity standard, designed specifically for mid-market businesses — the ones that usually don't have a treasury function, and don't run a sophisticated treasury system like a TMS. Neither is simple or cheap. Building a treasury team isn't. Implementing a TMS isn't. And in most cases, neither is entirely necessary — not if there is a simple methodology and framework to implement instead. That is why SLOS was born, and where SLOS serves. I started by implementing it with a spreadsheet. I have since built the SLOS App to automate the same framework. SLOS helps both financial and, especially, non-finance leaders gain cash intelligence and talk about cash liquidity fluently — without accounting jargon. A senior leadership team can still struggle to understand why profit is positive while cash is negative, if the explanation is "accrued revenue." But say it the SLOS way — "some revenue hasn't been billed yet, and unbilled revenue can't be collected, so it isn't cash yet" — and the intelligence lands immediately. A TMS can do almost everything. Most mid-market businesses will never need almost everything. I was deeply involved in TMS automation at a large global organisation. Imagine a business trading in over 85 currencies, with hundreds of hedging deals live and moving at the same time. Alongside that volume, the same system was calculating loans and bonds, recording and updating FX and interest rates, and processing intercompany transactions across entities on five continents — integrated into a wider finance system handling trading payments, receipts, and financial reporting on top of it all. I know what a TMS can do, because I have been the one running it. It is genuinely powerful. It is also genuinely complex — and that complexity obscured cash intelligence rather than revealing it. For a mid-market business that doesn't run trading at that scale, taking on that complexity was never the point. This is why I built SLOS as a standard focused on one thing only. Not accounting entries. Not hedging results. Not loan calculations. Cash — read daily, in a form built to be understood, not reconciled after the fact. A TMS is not wrong to be complex. It was built to carry the full weight of treasury operations. SLOS was built for something narrower, and for most businesses, more urgent: knowing where your cash stands, every day, without needing to run — or afford — the whole machine behind it. If you've ever struggled to explain "profit but no cash" to someone outside finance — I'd like to hear how you handled it. Comment, or send me a message. Mala Sun — Founder of Stonerose Treasury