# Treasury & Departments

A company's treasury sits at the root of the Mezzanine protocol.  It is, itself, a *multi-signature wallet.*  The signers of the Treasury contract are the *Board of Directors* of the organization.  

The Treasury contract is responsible for holding the vast majority of a company's assets at any given point in time.  Similar to how access control in Mezzanine is hierarchical, the *spending* and *allowances* of assets are also hierarchal.   An *allowance* is the amount that another address can spend of an ERC20 on behalf of another address.  For example, if Alice gives Bob an allowance of 100 USDC, Bob can spend up to 100 of Alice's USDC on her behalf.  

Access control in Mezzanine is hierarchical and follows a [tree-like data structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_\(data_structure\)), which in turn is similar to a traditional organizational hierarchy.  At the *root* of the tree lies the Treasury.  The signers of the Treasury, which, again, is a multi-signature wallet, are the company's *board of directors*.  As such, they can perform actions that the signers of departments cannot.  For example, they can issue authorized shares, add and remove departments or modules at any part of the organization*,* manage the signers of *any* department, etc.

Treasuries and departments in Mezzanine are multi-signature wallets.  Specifically, they are Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) wallets.  These types of wallets require cryptographic *signatures* from a set of *signers* to execute a transaction.  The number of required signatures to execute a transaction is called the *threshold* and can be different than the total number of signers.  

## Company Creation 

When making a Mezzanine company, five variables must be decided: 

1. **A company name:** all company names are unique
2. **The company's symbol:** the company's symbol functions the same as a ticker for publicly traded equities. All company symbols are unique
3. **The company's denomination asset:** the asset that is used to pay employees, determine if the company is at risk of bankruptcy, and distributed during a company's liquidation
4. **An initial number of authorized common shares**
5. **The company's board of directors:** who and how many people are set as directors 
6. **A threshold:** the number of directors needed to make a governance decision

Below is an example of the *most simple* Mezzanine company:

<figure><img src="/files/ejJFQxEFk5RZQeTnIH36" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

Mezzanine's smart contracts can be used by *anyone* and are not limited to a single interface.  Any group of individuals may choose to use our SDK to build an interface upon the Mezzanine protocol.  For example, a team building a decentralized exchange using Mezzanine may want to enable shareholder governance within their interface.  They can seamlessly accomplish this via our SDK.


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