The Real Cost of Not Having a Treasurer

I have heard the same sentence from CFOs of mid-market companies more times than I can count: "We don't really need a Treasurer yet — the controller handles it." It's almost never true, and the cost of believing it is almost never visible until it's too late.

Treasury isn't accounting. A controller's job is to record what happened. A treasurer's job is to anticipate what's coming and protect the company from it. Conflating the two is a common, expensive mistake — and it shows up in four predictable places.

1. Cash decisions made by people without context

In a company without a Treasurer, decisions about how much cash to hold, where to hold it, and what to do with the surplus get distributed across whoever is closest to the question that day. The CFO weighs in. The controller offers an opinion. The CEO has a preference. There's no consistent framework, and the result is cash management by improvisation.

The visible cost is missed yield on idle balances — typically 2–4% of operating cash, every year. The invisible cost is worse: liquidity surprises during periods of stress, when nobody has been actively modelling the runway against scenarios.

2. Banking relationships that drift

Banks understand exactly when their corporate clients lack a dedicated Treasury function. They charge accordingly. Without someone whose job it is to negotiate fee structures, audit FX spreads, and benchmark service levels, banking arrangements quietly drift toward bank-favourable terms.

The numbers here are not small. I have personally led banking reviews that found $1M+ in annual savings hiding in plain sight — fees, spreads, idle balances, redundant accounts — at companies that genuinely believed they had reasonable banking arrangements.

3. Insurance programs nobody is monitoring

In companies without a Treasury function, commercial insurance — property, casualty, cyber, D&O, cargo, fiduciary, workers' compensation — typically sits with whoever signed the last renewal. That person usually isn't an insurance professional, isn't tracking changes in your exposure, and isn't pushing back when premiums creep up year over year.

The result is two-sided: you overpay for the coverage you have, and you're under-insured against the exposures you've added. Both problems compound silently until a claim or a renewal review reveals them — and at that point, the cost of fixing them retroactively is much higher than the cost of preventing them would have been.

4. Risk that nobody owns

The most expensive cost is the hardest to measure. Treasury is where the company's financial risks consolidate — counterparty risk, FX risk, liquidity risk, fraud risk, interest rate risk, insurance gaps, pension obligations. Without someone whose job it is to see those risks together, each one gets handled by a different person, in isolation, with no consolidated view.

What that produces is a company that is technically functional on a good day and fragile on a bad one. The CFO knows this on some level and lives with it. Until something happens.

The objection — and the answer

The standard objection to all of this is real: a full-time senior Treasurer at a publicly-traded multinational costs $250,000–$400,000 in base salary, plus equity, plus a team. Most mid-market companies cannot justify that.

But the false dichotomy is between full-time Treasurer and no Treasury function at all. The actual choice is richer. A fractional Treasurer — one to three days a week, on a monthly retainer — captures most of the value at a fraction of the cost. So does an interim engagement during a specific transition. So does a project-based engagement to set up the function and then transition it back to internal staff with proper documentation.

The companies I see thrive are the ones that recognize Treasury is a function, not a job title. It needs to exist. It does not need to be staffed full-time at a senior level until the business actually requires it.