Why your money-market fund isn't showing in your daily cash report (and how to fix it)

You're a construction CFO with $400,000 sitting in a money-market fund. You open your treasury dashboard, look at the total cash line, and the MMF balance is missing. The dashboard tells you you have $3.4M in cash when you actually have $3.8M. The $400,000 in the MMF has silently disappeared from your morning view.

This is not a bug in your CFO's attention. It's a design default that most treasury tools inherited from banking integrations without questioning. And it matters because for any CFO who parks reserves in interest-bearing vehicles, the daily cash report is wrong by exactly the amount that's working hardest for the company.

This post explains why it happens, why it specifically matters for construction CFOs and anyone managing bonding capacity, and what TreasuryFlow did about it in our v3.5.0 release.

The technical default (plain-English version)

Bank data providers like Plaid categorize every connected account by type. The default categories are depository (checking, savings), credit (credit cards, lines of credit), loan (term loans, mortgages), and investment (brokerage, 401k, money-market funds, treasury-ladder accounts).

When a treasury tool integrates with Plaid, the developer has to choose which account types to pull balances for. The intuitive choice for a "daily cash report" is to pull depository and sometimes credit, and skip investment — because investment accounts are "not cash."

Except for the CFO who has active, liquid, same-day-redeemable money parked in a money-market fund sitting at a name-brand broker, that money absolutely is cash. It pays interest. It's redeemable. It counts toward your total liquid position. But the treasury tool isn't looking at it, because the default integration was written for a persona whose investment accounts were a 401k, not a sweep.

Why this breaks construction CFOs specifically

A $40M general contractor doesn't leave $4M in zero-yield checking. That would be malpractice. They park reserves in:

• A money-market fund at a name-brand broker
• A treasury-ladder account at a bank or third-party treasury-management platform
• A sweep account that daily flows excess cash from checking into an interest-bearing vehicle and back

For bonding-capacity conversations with sureties, the $4M in the MMF is part of your available liquidity. It's not restricted. It's not locked up. It's working cash that happens to be earning yield.

If your daily cash report says $3.4M when you have $3.8M, three things break:

1. You under-represent your bonding capacity. A surety looking at a $3.4M snapshot may bond less work than they would have at $3.8M.
2. You under-represent your runway for 13-week forecasts. A forecaster fed a stale number is useless.
3. Your reporting to investors, board, or lenders is wrong. If the dashboard they see is missing $400K, your credibility erodes the moment they ask where it went.

The CFO who most needs the number right is the one whose treasury tool is most likely to get it wrong. That's not bad luck. That's a design default written for the wrong persona.

Why most tools haven't fixed it

Three structural reasons:

1. The integration is a pain to get right. Investment account balances from Plaid come in different shapes than depository balances. Some are unit-count times NAV, some are cash-equivalents, some are mixed positions. The code has to normalize all of that.
2. It breaks assumptions elsewhere. If you suddenly include MMF balances in "cash," your downstream math — averages, variances, runway calcs — all need to re-check whether an investment balance counts the same as a checking balance for that specific calculation.
3. The persona it hurts most is small. Early-stage startups without a reserve strategy don't care. The persona that does care — mid-market CFOs, construction CFOs, multi-entity finance leaders — is a smaller slice of any treasury-tool customer base, so the bug stays low priority.

The consequence is that the CFO who most needs the number right is the one whose treasury tool is most likely to get it wrong.

What TreasuryFlow did about it

In v3.5.0 we widened our balance-sync to include investment-type accounts alongside depository. Every connected Plaid account — checking, savings, MMF, treasury ladder, sweep — now counts toward your daily cash position.

Along with that, we shipped role tagging. When you connect an account, you tell TreasuryFlow what it's for: operating, bonding, escrow, investment, payroll, trust, reserve, or other. Your dashboard shows a liquidity split: how much is liquid-operating, how much is restricted, and how much is in investment vehicles.

So the MMF doesn't disappear. And it also doesn't pretend to be the same as your operating checking — it carries its role forward so your decisions reflect which pot the cash is in.

What this looks like for a real CFO

A construction CFO we've been talking with has a $400K MMF at a name-brand broker, an operating account at a regional bank, a bonding-collateral account at a second bank, and a payroll account at a community bank. Before v3.5.0, their TreasuryFlow dashboard showed the sum of the three depository accounts. The MMF was connected, but its balance wasn't summing into daily cash — so their total-cash line was always $400K low.

After v3.5.0, the dashboard shows:

• Liquid operating: the sum of operating + payroll (after reserving for upcoming payroll)
• Restricted: the bonding collateral
• Investment: the MMF, called out separately
• Total cash position: the sum of all three

One number per category. All fresh. All bank-side truth, not QuickBooks-side truth.

Try it

If you have money parked in a money-market fund or treasury account and your current treasury tool isn't showing it, that's a fixable problem. TreasuryFlow consolidates every connected account and lets you tag each one's purpose, so what you see on your morning dashboard is what's actually working for the business.

$399/month, flat. 14-day free trial. No credit card. Construction CFOs can start directly at /construction-bonding to see the bonding-capacity workflow. Multi-entity CFOs can see the /multi-entity view. Pricing at /pricing.

If you'd rather see this demonstrated on a sandbox dataset before touching your own banks, book a 20-minute demo — we'll walk through the MMF-visible dashboard and the liquidity split live.

Frequently asked questions

v3.5.0 shipped April 2026. The investment-account widening was driven by a real construction-CFO customer whose MMF balance was silently excluded from the daily cash line. If you've hit this with another tool, we'd like to hear about it — email hello@treasuryflow.pantollventures.com.