In disbursing money for the navy and acting as a short-term funding recourse, the trésoriers incurred regular and extraordinary expenses which exposed them to many personal risks. As Table 1 below shows, over the course of a particular exercice, or financial year, the trésoriers faced a series of basic structural costs in remitting funds throughout France. The most prominent of these ordinary expenses was the remuneration, or appointements, of the commis employed by the trésoriers to execute payments in the ports and other localities. As the establishment and management of this network of private agents rested exclusively with the trésoriers, it was the trésoriers’ responsibility to pay the salaries of the commis working under them. However, the precise cost of hiring an individual commis for the duration of an exercice remains difficult to determine as the commis operated in relative obscurity. The total expense for which the trésoriers were personally liable was contingent on the proposed size of the naval budget and the projected scale of naval activity, which had a direct bearing on the number of commis that the trésoriers needed to help them make remittances. In the 1690s and 1700s, when the trésoriers’ private network reached its greatest extent, the trésoriers had to pay 197,500 l. in appointements to their agents in France and overseas over the course of an exercice. While the fact that the trésorier was responsible for salary payments to the commis might suggest that he exerted a degree of control over his agents, the opportunities offered by profiting from the provision of short-term loans and advances in the ports far outweighed the regular salary offered by the trésorier.

Aside from salary expenses, the trésoriers accumulated courier fees from the transmission of letters and packets between the trésoriers’ bureaus in Paris and the commis in the ports, as well as from correspondence with government ministers, local naval administrators, creditors, and major suppliers. By the 1700s, the trésoriers were paying an estimated 10,000 l. per exercice to the ferme générale des postes (the tax contractors that collected duties on post) through either the directors of the postal bureau or the tax contractors in Paris where the ferme directly administered the postal system.