The financial officers who constituted the naval treasury, the trésoriers généraux de la Marine, were an integral part of the navy's system of finance. Alongside the trésoriers of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, the navy's trésoriers were some of Louis XIV's most important paymasters, whose operations uniquely spanned virtually all of France's provinces and interacted with the wide range of industries and manpower resources that the navy relied on. Situated in the Marais and the quartier Richelieu in Paris, these office-holders were tightly integrated into the administrative and financial hub that financed and sustained the crown's military enterprises: these were the same locations where the administrative and social elite had established their grands hôtels, and leading officers, bankers, and financiers conducted their business. In the 1690s and 1700s, the growing indispensability of the position of trésorier to the navy's funding was the direct result of Louis XIV's increasingly expensive war effort and the deteriorating fiscal resources he could rely on to fund his military activities.

The fundamental purpose of the navy's paymasters was to fund the navy's operations by matching the royal revenues designated for its consumption to the navy's myriad expenses. Responsible for managing the navy's accounts, these comptables effectively operated as a central clearing house by receiving the navy's share of the crown's income and disbursing these funds on the government's request. Once the navy's funding allocation was decided at the start of the year, the authority to arrange payments to the navy's creditors resided principally with the king. Once aware of the specifics of the navy's needs, the secrétaire d’État de la Marine (naval minister) operating out of the naval bureau in Paris was responsible for drawing up a series of ordonnances de paiements, or payment orders, which then would have been presented to the contrôleur général des finances (finance minister) and, subsequently, the king for countersigning before they were issued to the trésoriers. The ordonnances de paiements formed the basis of a trésorier's operations, directing him to remit money to payees in the ports and other localities throughout France. Without possession of one of these payment orders, the trésorier was strictly forbidden from moving royal funds to acquit costs.