Arguement for:
Capital allocation gatekeeper- Every department competes for budget; finance decides where money flows. for example a bad marketing campaign can waste money and prevent future growth.
Cash is survival, not profit- Profitable companies die from cash flow problems constantly. Finance is the only function tracking runway, working capital, and liquidity in real time.
It's the common language- Every other department's success gets translated into finance's terms (ROI, margin, profit) for leadership and investors to act on. If finance can't tell the story, good work elsewhere goes unrecognized or underfunded.
Risk control- Finance catches fraud, covenant breaches, tax exposure, and compliance failures before they become existential , these are typically the failure modes that actually kill companies, not weak products.
External credibility - Lenders, investors, and auditors deal with finance directly. Bad financial governance closes off capital markets regardless of how good the product is.
Arguement against : finance is a "necessary but not the only important department" argument.
Finance manages value, it doesn't create it , product, sales, and engineering generate the revenue and margin finance is allocating and reporting on. A company with brilliant finance and a bad product still fails.
overall a well balanced business where there isn't a hierarchy of departments , it's a system where each function is a single point of failure for the whole. Ranking them by importance is like asking which organ in a body is most important: remove any one and the answer becomes obvious in retrospect. The real skill isn't crowning a "most important" department, it's recognizing which one is the current bottleneck, and resourcing it before it becomes the reason everything else stops working.
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