Every company past a certain size has a finance department. Almost nobody outside that department — and, honestly, plenty of people inside it — could tell you exactly who does what, why the org chart is shaped the way it is, or why a bank’s finance function looks nothing like a software company’s. The Finance Function, Mapped exists to close that gap directly: a practical, organisational companion to Volume I’s map of the system and Volume II’s practitioner instruments, this time pointed inward at the finance department itself.
This volume asks a narrower, more concrete question than the first two: not “how does the global economy work,” and not “how do you build a valuation,” but simply — who reports to the CFO, what does each of those people actually do day to day, and how does the answer change depending on whether you’re inside a large industrial corporate, a bank, a private equity fund, an insurer, a SaaS company, or an early-stage startup?
Understanding this map has direct, practical value whether you’re deciding which finance career path to pursue, trying to figure out who to talk to about a specific problem inside your own company, or simply making sense of a job title you’ve seen on LinkedIn and never quite understood. This volume is built to answer all three.
How This Volume Is Organised
Four Parts, moving from the general to the specific:
| Part | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| Part A — The CFO Role Itself | What every CFO owns everywhere, what genuinely differs by firm type, and the CFO’s relationship to the CEO and board |
| Part B — Org Charts by Firm Type | Six complete organisation charts — large corporate, bank, PE/hedge fund, insurer, IT/SaaS company, and startup/scale-up — showing who reports to the CFO and roughly how large each team typically is |
| Part C — Role-by-Role Deep Dives | Sixteen finance roles covered individually — cadence (what actually happens daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually), reporting lines, and the specific other roles each one depends on and why |
| Part D — How the Function Scales | The five-stage growth path tracing how an entire finance function scales from a single outsourced bookkeeper to a fully specialised 200+ person organisation |
If you already know which role interests you, Part C is built to be read out of order — each role’s chapter stands on its own, with explicit cross-references back to Part B’s org charts and forward or sideways to the other roles it interacts with most. If you’re earlier in figuring that out, reading Parts A through D in sequence gives you the fullest picture, each Part narrowing from the CFO’s own role down to the specific mechanics of a single seat.
Every role chapter in Part C uses the same structure: what the role actually does, organised by how often it happens; why the role matters enough to exist as its own seat; for eleven of the sixteen roles, a deeper worked walkthrough of the role’s single most technical recurring task; and a “Reporting Lines & Key Interactions” map showing exactly who the role reports to and which other roles it depends on most, cross-referenced by Part and section number so you can jump straight there.
What You Now Know
- This volume maps the finance function itself — who reports to the CFO, what each role actually does, and how that changes across six genuinely different firm types.
- Four Parts move from general to specific: the CFO role itself, six org charts by firm type, sixteen individual role deep-dives, and the five-stage growth path a finance function follows as a company scales.