A day in the life of a Treasurer.

1.What is the starting salary range for this role?

The Starting salary depends on the size of the company, for SME, you could expect to see £110K, whilst for FTSE – £125/130K+

Bonuses tend to range from 20-50%. Again this totally depends on the size of the role, location and the business.

2.How do you enter this field?

Treasury can be entered in many ways, some study at a practice firm, qualify as an Accountant, achieve an ACA and move into Treasury. Others may come from an internal move from Finance or Tax, and some come through a Cash route i.e. AP/AR or a Cash Analyst type role.

The most important qualification in Treasury is the AMCT. This is the professional body for Treasurers and can be studied by contacting https://www.treasurers.org/ – Once AMCT qualified, you can then move to the next stage, which is the most advanced qualification; the MCT.

3. What does a typical day in the office look like?

It is worth mentioning, that no Treasurer role is exactly the same, however below is a general overview of some of the tasks.

On the operational side, you are likely to do cash management in the morning, work out where the cash is coming from and where it’s going, Liquidity and FX deals, assessing what you are long and short on and trading (transactional hedging). Then the afternoon would be spent looking at settlements.

Depending on if you have subsidiaries, in the morning you will be speaking to Asia etc then move round the world as the sun goes down, Europe lunch time and South America in the afternoon.

Throughout the day you may have meetings with banks, and possible ongoing projects happening.

Some Treasurers don’t do the Operations themselves and leave that to the team. As a result you would spend more of the day dealing with regional banks, helping subsidiaries, strategic management and high level projects etc.

The higher up you go and the bigger team you have, the more of the day you’ll spend looking at team management

4.What is the most challenging aspect of the job?

Ensuring people are complying with policy, often other teams don’t see it as a priority and you have to ensure they do. Compliance is important both internally and externally.

Over the years, there has been a change to a lot more time and effort into looking at the counterparty risks of the banks you are dealing with, where as previously it may have been more the other way round.

5.What is the most rewarding aspect of the job?

Finishing projects such as cash pooling, trade finance, training courses, debt issuances, TMS implementations. Team management and seeing staff develop.

6.What skills are the most important to perform well in this kind of role?

Collaboration communication and stakeholder management are key elements, along with being level-headed and a strong planner. Everyone has their own agenda and you need to be able to understand other people’s requirements.

Being able to promote Treasury is important, sometimes it is not at the forefront of people’s minds. It’s an area of expertise that some companies who aren’t educated in. Treasury isn’t always fully utilised, however it should be as it is in fact an incredibly important function of most successful businesses.

7.What advice would you give to someone looking to apply for a similar role?

Treasury is often an area people fall in to. It is operational along with strategic, and you often interact with a huge spectrum of the business, so it is important to realise that and be a good communicator. You should be able to demonstrate the importance of Treasury and that you are there to help the business and drive it forward. The role is forward-looking and when things go wrong in a business you are likely to know about it and so you need to be someone who is always on top of things.

NB: This information was gathered from speaking to a number of Treasurers and is a bringing together of their thoughts, it is not indicative of every single Treasurer role