For a group that works with numbers all day, the corporate treasury function is less likely to quantify its own performance than you might expect. Treasuries that don't put measures in place to demonstrate how well they're doing are passing up an opportunity to win recognition from their company and bolster their case for additional resources, but many treasury teams seem willing to let that opportunity slide.

"Even among the best treasuries, the one area consistently where there seems to be a gap is around the area of performance management," said Peter Frank, a partner at PwC and leader of its corporate treasury consulting group in the U.S. "Treasurers in general do a poor job of, at the top, articulating what their objectives are, and then coming up with sets of metrics and using those to guide performance improvement or to communicate internally their value to the organization."

Bruce Lynn, a managing partner at Financial Executives Consulting Group, pointed to a survey of strategic treasury conducted in 2014 by the Association for Financial Professionals and Oliver Wyman that showed the most popular treasury metrics were reported by just over half of the companies surveyed.