Organizations assign primary responsibility for maintaining cash flow projections to the finance function, led by the Chief Financial Officer. In practice day-to-day ownership often sits with the treasurer or the Financial Planning & Analysis team while accounting supplies historical cash data and operational units provide timing inputs. This division balances strategic oversight, technical forecasting, and ground-level accuracy, ensuring projections are both forward-looking and tied to real operations.
Roles and responsibilities
The CFO is accountable for the integrity of liquidity planning and for setting policy, risk tolerance, and escalation protocols. The treasurer typically consolidates short-term forecasts, manages bank relationships, and executes liquidity actions. The FP&A team builds medium-term models used for budgeting and scenario analysis. Operational managers in sales, procurement, and treasury-adjacent functions are responsible for delivering accurate cash timing, such as customer receipts and vendor payments. Michael C. Jensen Harvard Business School has written extensively on the allocation of financial responsibilities and the importance of clear accountability for firm-level outcomes, which underpins why organizations assign forecasting roles to named functions rather than leaving them ad hoc.
Relevance, causes, and consequences
Reliable cash flow projections determine whether an organization can meet payroll, service debt, invest, or survive shocks. Causes of forecasting difficulty include seasonal demand, volatile receivables, foreign exchange exposure, and changes in payment behavior. Multinational firms face additional territorial and regulatory complexity