Microfinance

Le crédit de trésorerie is the loan a shopkeeper takes out to buy stock, and the noun inside it is one of the hardest-working words in French business language. La trésorerie is, first and most often, the cash a business actually has in hand: une entreprise en difficulté de trésorerie has run short of money for this month’s bills, des tensions de trésorerie are cash-flow problems, and un plan de trésorerie is the week-by-week forecast of what comes in and what goes out. Next it is the job and the people who look after that money, the treasury desk of a large firm. And it has a public relative in le Trésor public, the arm of the state that holds and pays out the state’s money. « Treasury » in English reaches only the last two, the department inside the firm and the ministry outside it; for the first and commonest sense there is no English noun at all, only the compound « cash flow » and the bare word « cash ». Which is why le prêt sur flux de trésorerie is a cash-flow-based loan, and why nothing on this page concerns a treasury.