GTreasury™ Helps Love’s Country Stores
Improve Treasury Operations with Minimal
Staff Growth

When a company grows, its employee base generally grows
with it, on both the operations and administrative sides of the
business. In the case of the treasury department of Love’s Travel Stops &
Country Stores, a national chain of gas stations and convenience stores, the
business has grown tremendously while treasury head count has increased by
only one person—all while providing improved cash management and financial
reporting.

Love’s began as a solo filling station in Watonga, Oklahoma in 1964, opened by
Tom Love. The family-owned and operated business has expanded to 230 travel
stops and convenience stores in 34 states. In the past 10 years, the company
has grown to $17 billion in revenues, from $3 billion. Treasury staff has remained
at three people until 2007, when the company added a fourth. Not only has
Love’s treasury kept up with the increased number of transactions during that
time, but it has also improved both treasury quality and efficiency.
Treasury Automation Efficiencies

Carol Willett, Love’s manager of treasury services, credit’s the company’s use
of the GTreasury treasury management and cash management system for the
department’s ability to handle a radically increasing workload through treasury
automation and forecasting. Love’s began using the treasury management
software from Lake Zurich, Illinois-based GTreasury—a leading provider of
treasury management software and services—in 1999 to better track its accounts
and avoid time-consuming manual procedures.

Since then, Love’s has moved to the GTreasury ASP-based system, which has
become the daily focal point for cash operations. Love’s relies on GTreasury’s
software to collect and download bank balances, establish daily cash position
and ending balances of corporate accounts, assign general-ledger numbers,
and create forecasts of store deposits using GTreasury’s forecast module. The
application service provider (ASP) software has helped Love’s save time and
streamline processes through the following:

• Daily bank balance import
• Daily reconciliation of store accounts
• Automatic generation of cash concentration transfers
• Recurring wire transfers and ACH payments using templates
• Monthly reconciliation with few or no errors
• Automatic assignment of general ledger codes to transactions
• Monthly export of transactions to the corporate general ledger

Disciplined Treasury Processes

Love’s has instilled accurate financial reporting throughout its stores. At the end
of each day, stores make deposits and report cash totals to treasury. Because
some of Love’s stores are in remote locations, in small towns and along
Interstate highways, the company has about 110 bank relationships, many with
smaller community banks.

Love’s downloads balances directly through GTreasury for about half of those
banks. Balances for the rest are gathered by treasury staff collecting information
from online banking systems, entering it into an Access database, and importing
that into GTreasury using its import tool.

As a result, Love’s treasury has the information it needs to reconcile store
accounts daily. “We were not able to do that before,” Willett reported. “We would
reconcile once a month, so we would not know for 35-40 days after the fact if a
deposit was missing.”

Love’s treasury uses GTreasury to establish the daily cash position on the
corporate account. Current-day cash information feeds into worksheets, so
Willett knows the daily cash position by 10 or 10:30 a.m. and makes decisions
accordingly.

The GTreasury’s cash forecasting module allows Love’s to plan cash needs.
GTreasury keeps a history report for store operations. From that information,
Love’s treasury determines how much to sweep daily from store accounts to
a corporate concentration account. When the sweep is ready, Willett clicks
a button, and GTreasury creates and makes some 200-300 transfers to
concentrate funds.

Another major time savings comes from GTreasury’s ability to link to Love’s
corporate accounting system. GTreasury includes a rules-based system
that automatically assigns most general ledger codes to transactions for
general-ledger export. “We have thousands of rules to do those assignments
automatically every day,” Willett said, “so we can automatically export 40,000 to
45,000 transactions a month into the GL. This is a huge time savings.”

Greater Transparency

Love’s also has more transparent financial operations as a result of GTreasury
reports, which improves financial communications and operations throughout
the company. “We are able to share information with other departments easier,”
Willett says.

For one, other financial departments have access to specific GTreasury reports,
which allows them to find the information they need without calling treasury staff.
“We’re not the only one who can see treasury transactions, so we don’t get as
many calls.”

For instance, Love’s fuel wholesaling business makes trades for bulk fuel
transactions that are paid by wire transfer. With the bank information available
on GTreasury and through strong security, staff at the wholesale department can
see when wire transfers hit the account without having to call Love’s treasury or
going to bank sites.

Love’s transition to the ASP version of the system in 2006 helped ease the
additional work load of the increasing number of wire transfers from the
wholesale fuel division and kept the staffing increase to a minimum. “We really
lucked out on timing,” Willett said. “Before we went to the ASP version, we were
doing wire transfers through banks. We went to ASP in 2006 not realizing the
wire transfer volume would increase. If we hadn’t switched, we would have had
problems. With GTreasury, our system is always in balance.”

About Love’s

Love’s stores offer gasoline, food, and rest stop accommodations for travelers,
and many include chain restaurants such as Subway, Arby’s, and Carl’s Jr.
Founded in 1964 by Tom Love, Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores is
headquartered in Oklahoma City, Okla., and remains family owned and operated.
With more than 200 locations in more than 30 states, Love’s current growth rate
is approximately 15 stores per year. Love’s is currently ranked No. 15 on Forbes
Magazine’s annual listing of America’s largest privately held companies. From
the first filling station in Watonga, Okla., the Love’s commitment has remained
the same: “Clean Places, Friendly Faces.”

About GTreasury

For the past 24 years, GTreasury has provided best-of-breed treasury and cash
management software and services to leading banks and corporations of all
sizes and all over the globe. GTreasury™ provides the ONE Enterprise Treasury
Platform for both ASP/SaaS Services and On-Site Treasury Workstations
Installations.

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