The of a finance department is determined by each individual company, largely depending on whether it is a small, medium or large sized organization. The most typical organizational structure consists of a , a vice president, one or more accountants and a analyst.The chief financial officer, or CFO, is the head of the finance department, which also means that this person is at the top of the organizational structure. The CFO is not only the boss or the person that everyone in the finance department reports to, but he or she is also responsible for the overall planning and guidance for implementing the plan when it comes to the finances of the company.The CFO reports to the chief executive officer of the company. He or she also works with the heads of other departments, including, manufacturing, sales, marketing, production or any of the other departments that comprise the company. The CFO meets with the heads of all of these departments for planning purposes. Each department has needs for conducting their jobs and the finance department is in charge of creating, managing and allocating funds from the company budget to meet all of these needs. The next position in the organizational structure of a finance department is the vice president.
As for a small company, the organizational structure chart must be concise and complete so that the whole company can move forward, with the least expense, normally and smoothly. The responsibility of every fragment is as the following: This part is responsible for some key decisions on investment and strategies for the overall company.
This person reports directly to the CFO, and is more involved in working directly with the accountants in the department to implement the plan that the CFO and the other heads of the departments have worked on for running the business.The next level is the accounting department. The accountants are the ones that handle the day-to-day accounting and operations of the business.
This typically includes invoicing, reconciling, cutting checks and paying bills, tracking the company budget and then reporting all of this back to the vice president.The lowest rung on the organizational structure is typically the. He or she may be involved in working out the company budget and the amount of the budget that is allocated to each department in the company. The primary role of the budget analyst, however, is to track the budget and analyze areas where the company may be over or under spending and bringing this to the attention of the accountants and vice president of the finance department so tweaks can be made. @allenJo - The reality is that formal organizational structure is more clearly defined in some businesses better than others.In some companies, I was given a chart. In the smaller companies, I was given next to nothing.
The problem with being given nothing is not that I don’t know who the president is; that’s usually easy to figure out.It’s that I don’t always know who the real manager is. Is it a fellow coworker who happens to have some supervisory roles but doesn’t have “manager” as his title? Is it his boss?I’ve gotten into some difficult situations in the past because I wasn’t clear on that. I recommend that you know who you report to up front, and the scope of their authority, regardless of title.
@nony - You bring up an important point. Regardless of titles, different companies have different types of organizational structures. They don’t always fit the neat model described in the article.I think that the article’s description would tend to describe large corporations more than it would small businesses, but there can be overlapping of duties with people who hold various positions.I do believe that the analyst, budgetary or otherwise, is the most generic of jobs and can be called upon to fill a variety of roles that the CFO or other accountants would need. Sometimes you need a team of analysts working together, I would think, depending on the size of the organization. I work for a small business, so a lot of this functional organizational structure gets flattened out; there’s less of a hierarchy.For example, the CFO in our company is the boss’s wife. She performs all the duties mentioned in the article, but of course from our standpoint as employees her most important role is payroll.I remember when I first started working for the company and I identified her to a coworker as payroll.
I was immediately corrected. He reminded me that her official title was CFO and that I should never call her payroll.
I guess titles still mean something.Actually, come to think of it, I believe our administrative assistant helps out with some of the budget analysis mentioned in the article. Our CFO is mainly concerned with the more important accounting functions, including, dare I say it, payroll.
Accounting Department Structure in Brief.1.AccountingDepartmentStructureThis presentation is sample from the “Financial Training for Business Owners and Non-financial Managers” developed by me. Big part of this material was collected from differentopen online resources, links and references can be provided at request.If you are interested in the full content of this training or just want to say “hi”, pleasecontact me. [email protected] Definitions:. Accounting is measurement, processing and communication offinancial information about economic entities. Accounting,which has been called the 'language of business', measuresthe results of an organization's economic activities andconveys this information to a variety of users, includinginvestors, creditors, management, and regulators. Practitionersof accounting are known as accountants.
The terms'accounting' and 'financial reporting' are often used assynonyms. Finance is a field that deals with the study of investments. Itincludes the dynamics of assets and liabilities over time underconditions of different degrees of uncertainty and risk. Financecan also be defined as the science of money management.Finance aims to price assets based on their risk level and theirexpected rate of return.
Finance can be broken into threedifferent sub-categories: public finance, corporate finance andpersonal finance.Who is in charge of Accounting and Finance?Depending on Company size. For large and mid sizecompanies it is CFO (ChiefFinance Officer). For small companies evenVice president for financeor a controllerFor small and mid-sizebusinesses accounting andfinance functions are usuallycombined.