In the period between 1701 and 1709, naval expenditure reached a cumulative 171.8 million l. Yet, on the basis of an agreement reached in the Conseil royal des finances, contrôleur général Chamillart had only committed the finance ministry to supplying the navy with an annual wartime budget of 18 million l., before the worsening fiscal environment forced a reduction to 14 million l. per annum after 1706. In directing the navy's trésoriers to pay the navy's expenses, naval minister Pontchartrain would have been aware that the contrôleur général was going to provide approximately 150 million l. in funding over this nine-year period, but the pressures of war and the state's organisational shortcomings ensured that naval spending rarely reflected the availability of fiscal resources. At the height of the fleet's strategic importance between 1701 and 1706, the naval ministry exceeded Chamillart's total theoretical funding commitment by 21.3 per cent, or 23 million l. The problem stemmed from a series of important overruns in spending which had occurred in 1702 and 1704–05, when Louis XIV's wide-ranging geostrategic needs at sea caused the navy to exceed its budget by 35.7 per cent in those years alone.

The disjuncture between the navy's incurred expenses and its allocated budget stemmed from the finance ministry's inability to control spending by other ministers. The contrôleur général lacked the authority and practical framework to oversee each ministry's internal expenditure procedures, which embedded a pervasive tendency to overspend in Louis XIV's expenditure system. In other words, the spending ministries often contracted debts without specific reference to their capacity to fund them. Both the ordonnances de paiements, which required the naval treasury to transfer royal funds to the navy's locations of expenditure, and the ordonnances de fonds, which released funds to the naval treasury, were theoretically agreed between the king and the naval minister in consultation with the contrôleur général, but practice indicates that the naval ministry's spending decisions were not always made with the finance ministry's full awareness. The degree of information compartmentalisation that existed in the crown's revenue-raising and expenditure systems was disruptive because the contrôleur général, who was ultimately responsible for ensuring that the Trésor royal matched the ordonnances de fonds with assignations on revenue sources, could be presented with spending demands that exceeded available funds.