Implicit cash management

Background: implicit cash management is a feature that helps users to buy and sell securities without having to care about “transferring” cash to the reference account. This feature is however not intended to be used with cash-only accounts such as savings or checking accounts.

How does it work?

Whenever we see that the account balance would become negative, then we will create a “correction booking” - also called “virtual transaction” in the API. This mimics the real world in which we have to transfer money in order to buy stock.

Example 1 - negative balance:

• the account balance is € 500

• we buy stock for € 1.000

• then we will create a “virtual transaction” for € 500 and the account balance will be zero. The idea here is that for a real bank account, we have to transfer money in order to execute this buy.

Example 2 - positive balance:

• the account balance is € 500

• we sell stock for € 1.000

• then the account balance is € 1.500 and no virtual transaction was created.

How to display adjusting entries

The API lets you choose if you want to include them in the response or not, use the parameter includeAdjustingEntries of GET ​/v1​/transactions.

How to enable / disable adjusting entries

The API let’s you enable / disable adjusting entries on account level, use parameter enableImplicitTransactions PUT ​/v1​/accounts​/{id}.

And what about accounts that have been imported?

For such accounts we have two cases:

1. we have transaction data from the bank, starting at point X (depending on the bank, e.g. 1 year ago)

2. before this, we only have manually maintained transaction data

In the first case, we always use the bank’s data, no matter if adjusting entries are enabled or not. Before that, we typically

• enable adjusting entries for reference accounts

• disable adjusting entries for cash accounts