The organizational structure 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 chief financial officer (CFO), a vice president, one or more accountants and a budget 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 (CEO) of the company. He or she also works with the heads of other departments, including human resources, 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. 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 bookkeeping 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 budget analyst. 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.