What does a treasurer do?

What is a Treasurer?

A treasurer, also known as a certified treasury professional in certain job settings, is an expert in finance who directly oversees the long-term and short-term budgetary goals of a business or an organization. Another interchangeable job title used to describe a treasurer is a financial officer, the preferred term in the corporate business world. In a large corporation, the chief financial officer presides over the financial decision-making process of the entire company's portfolio of investments and acquisitions.

What does a Treasurer do?

A treasurer ensures that a business or organization stays in good financial health by producing detailed financial statements and coordinating investment decisions. Treasurers also work in tandem with other corporate executives in order to create and meet the quarter-to-quarter budgetary benchmarks as instructed by the chief executive officer.

Treasurers used to work to monitor the day-to-day finances of a business, but in the modern era advances in computer software technology have created a shift in their job responsibilities. Today, treasurers can focus more of their time on raising capital, coordinating mergers, and deciding on which companies to acquire in order to further the success of a business or organization.

Depending upon the type of employment setting, the job duties of a treasurer may vary from business to business and from organization to organization. For example, the job duties of a treasurer employed by a municipal government body in the United States or Canada differ slightly from the job duties of a treasurer employed by a large energy company. Government-employed treasurers tend to focus more on budgetary appropriations procedures unique to the job, but treasurers in the private sector tend to focus more on special financial sector regulations and tax laws.

In another manner of speaking, treasurers employed by a large insurance company would spend a great deal of time preparing financial forecasts based upon the analysis of past and projected financial activity reports. Treasurers work tirelessly to prepare the final financial documents that are used to make recommendations to executives or a board of directors. Without this rather detailed financial analysis, large insurance companies would not be able to make the decision to offer improved coverage to their customers.

Treasurers may also directly oversee a business or organization's in-house financial department. These job duties consist of discovering inventive strategies to reduce workplace costs and raise efficiency. Treasurers may achieve this goal by supervising the day-to-day operations of employees charged with producing financial reports and updated budgets.

Technology has advanced the job description of treasurers to encompass more analytical tasks than in previous decades. For instance, treasurers now have an ever-growing number of software applications at their disposal. Companies may devote entire internal computer networks to the single task of keeping revenue models updated in tandem with the current health of the global stock markets. Previously, a team of two or three professionals would work long hours to present the most up to date market projections, but today, this process has become nearly automatic.

What is the workplace of a Treasurer like?

Treasurers typically work in an office setting. Banks, manufacturers, or insurance companies are the types of businesses that employ at least one treasurer. Within large corporations, the company may keep hundreds of financial professionals on staff, overseen by the corporate chief financial officer.

Due to the corporate work environment, treasurers often find themselves traveling to different field offices around the world, particularly when compiling information on mergers and acquisitions. Advances in technology, however, have minimized the amount of travel time necessary while creating a more technologically advanced work setting. Indeed, the day-to-day responsibilities of modern treasurers demand total immersion in any number of new computer information systems.