At 3%-Plus Rates, Forecasting Errors Have a Real Price Tag for CFOs

Corporate cash forecasting was easier to tolerate as an imperfect discipline when idle cash earned almost nothing. After all, for most of the zero-rate era, an imperfect cash forecast was an operational nuisance.

But in 2026, it can be an earnings leak.

According to a Monday (Aug. 17) report, economists expect the Federal Reserve to hold its benchmark interest rate above 3% through the end of the year, extending an environment in which corporate liquidity continues to carry meaningful economic value. That, in turn, changes an old treasury calculation.

When cash earned almost nothing, the penalty for keeping an extra $50 million sitting in an operating account as protection against an uncertain forecast was relatively small. When short-term money earns several percentage points, unnecessary liquidity buffers become expensive.

And while chief financial officers can’t just sweep every available dollar into higher-yielding instruments because companies need liquidity for payroll, suppliers, taxes and unexpected obligations, the new question for CFOs not just how much cash their companies have, but how precisely they know when they will need it.

For treasury departments, forecasting accuracy is starting to have a P&L.

Read more: The $100 Million CFO Doesn’t Keep Score. They Call the Plays.

The Price of Being Wrong Is Going Up for Corporate Finance

Consider a company that habitually keeps $100 million more in low-yielding operational cash than it needs because treasury lacks confidence in the timing of receivables and payments. A 3-percentage-point difference between what that cash earns and what it could earn elsewhere represents roughly $3 million of annual opportunity cost.

That isn’t a prediction about what any particular company can earn. It illustrates why something as mundane as forecast accuracy matters much more when rates remain elevated.

At the same time, the rate picture confronting CFOs is becoming more fragmented. Long-term Treasury yields have been climbing even as expectations for another Fed hike have receded. The 30-year Treasury yield reached 5.31% Tuesday (Aug. 18), its highest level since 2007, amid concerns ranging from oil prices and inflation to fiscal deficits and debt supply.

For enterprise CFOs, “higher for longer” is no longer simply a Fed story. It is becoming an environment in which the price of capital can remain elevated even as different parts of the yield curve move in different directions.

See more: Fed Study Shows B2B Payments Becoming a Cost-Per-Event Problem

From Cash Visibility to Cash Predictability

Corporate treasury has spent years pursuing “cash visibility.” The phrase has helped drive investment in treasury management systems, bank APIs, ERP integrations and real-time payment infrastructure. But seeing cash is different than forecasting it.

The traditional treasury forecast often depends on expected payment dates that bear only an imperfect relationship to when money actually moves. A customer invoice might technically be due Friday but arrive Monday. A cross-border supplier payment may leave an account before treasury knows exactly when the beneficiary will receive it. Collections can cluster unpredictably around month’s end.

Knowing that $40 million sits across 12 bank accounts this morning, for example, solves one problem. Knowing that $27 million will arrive Wednesday, $31 million will leave Thursday and a large customer payment expected Friday has an 80% probability of arriving Monday instead solves another. The strategic opportunity is connecting those signals early enough that treasury can act on them.

“What real-time transaction data is doing is enabling us to have a forward-looking assessment,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Technology Officer Rinku Sharma told PYMNTS in April. “The question used to be what happened. Now the question is, what should we do about it right now?”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience” found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead.

In today’s landscape, the competitive advantage isn’t knowing where the cash is. It is knowing where the cash doesn’t need to be.

Read also: Two Years Ago vs. Today: CFOs and the ERP Shift

Payments Become a Forecasting Input

This puts payments infrastructure at the center of the 2026 treasury equation. A payment that can be initiated and settled when treasury chooses reduces the need to estimate how long money will spend traveling through the financial system. Better data accompanying those payments can also help finance teams identify incoming cash and reconcile it faster.

A business holding $500 million in liquidity but uncertain about tomorrow’s obligations may behave more conservatively than one holding $400 million with extremely accurate forecasts of its inflows and outflows.

The payoff can therefore appear on both sides of the balance sheet: less idle cash on one side and less unnecessary borrowing on the other.

According to findings from the 2025/2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, a Visa report in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence, 7 in 10 “Adaptive” CFOs and treasurers in the study used working capital solutions to pay suppliers faster and to stay agile and strengthen supplier relationships in a volatile economy.

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