Treasury Management for Fast-Scaling Aerospace and Defense Companies

A Founder and CFO Primer: What the Largest Balance Sheets Actually Do, and What You Should Do Instead

You raised the capital. Now it sits in an operating account earning close to nothing, and nobody owns the question of what to do with it.

We read the investment footnotes of 21 of the largest technology and hardware balance sheets, straight from their SEC filings, and translated them into what a scaling aerospace and defense company should copy and what it should ignore.

What's inside

• How the biggest balance sheets actually hold their liquidity, and why Nvidia keeps just 1.9% in banks
• Why a deposit is a credit exposure and a custodied Treasury is not
• A four-bucket treasury structure, with parameter ranges for $50M, $250M and $1B
• The aerospace and defense layer: progress payments, accelerated payments and prime payment terms
• Why cutting DSO by two weeks can be worth up to 38 times the yield pickup
• A Monday-morning checklist of ten actions

Download the primer (PDF) →

Educational only. Not investment, legal, tax or accounting advice. Rate and yield figures are as of late August 2026.

‍