Currencies

Currencies are the foundational reference data entity. Every trade, cashflow, position, and P&L figure in the system is denominated in a currency; getting the currency record right is a prerequisite for everything else.

The international standard for currency codes is ISO 4217. It defines a three-letter alphabetic code (USD, EUR, GBP), a three-digit numeric code (840, 978, 826), a currency name, and the number of decimal places — for example, USD has 2 minor units, meaning amounts are expressed to the nearest cent.

ISO 4217 is widely adopted and OreStudio uses it as its primary identifier. However, the standard has gaps that matter in practice:

• It does not classify currencies by market tier — the distinction between major G10 currencies and emerging-market currencies is economically important but absent from the standard.
• It does not cover digital assets. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum are increasingly relevant in financial systems but have no ISO 4217 code.
• It says nothing about display formatting — whether a symbol precedes or follows the amount, what the thousands and decimal separators are, or how the fractional unit is labelled.
• It does not specify rounding conventions — whether a calculation result should be rounded up, down, or to the nearest unit.

OreStudio extends the ISO 4217 model with additional fields to cover these gaps: monetary nature, market tier, currency symbol, fraction symbol, a printf-style format string, and configurable rounding rules. The standard fields remain primary; the extensions are supplementary.

Open the Currencies window from the Reference Data menu. It lists all currencies defined in the tenant, with one row per currency.

The toolbar buttons reload the list and adjust the display. The list is paginated; use the page controls at the bottom right to navigate. Double-clicking a row opens the Currency Details dialog.

The Currency Details dialog has four tabs: General, Formatting, Rounding, and Provenance. The three action buttons at the bottom — Delete, Close, and Save — apply to the currency as a whole.

To edit a currency, open it in the Currency Details dialog, make your changes, and click Save. Before the record is written, OreStudio prompts for a change reason.

Select a Reason from the drop-down and add optional Commentary. Click Save to confirm. Every save creates a new version; the previous version is never overwritten.

To view the full change history, open the details dialog and click the history icon in the title bar, or right-click the row and choose History.

Select a version to populate the detail panel. The Changes tab shows which fields changed between the selected version and its predecessor. The Revert button reinstates any historical version as a new version, preserving the full audit chain.

The three tables described in this section act as classification vocabularies for currencies. In a standard deployment their values are fixed at provisioning time and rarely change; OreStudio still versions and audits them the same way as any other reference data. They are managed by the system tenant and are accessible from the Reference Data → Currencies sub-menu.

The ORE Studio interactive shell provides quick currency access without opening the Qt UI:

# List all currencies (paginated)
currencies get

# Add a new currency:
#   <iso_code> <name> <numeric_code> <symbol> <fractions_per_unit>
#   <change_reason_code> <change_commentary>
currencies add XTS "Test Currency" 963 T$ 100 system.test "manual example"

# Delete a currency by ISO code
currencies delete XTS

# Show history for a currency
currencies history USD

The ores.cli command-line tool provides a richer interface for automation. All currency commands live under ores.cli refdata currencies:

# List all currencies as a table
ores.cli refdata currencies list --format table

# List a specific currency as JSON
ores.cli refdata currencies list --format json --key EUR

# Add a new currency
ores.cli refdata currencies add \
  --iso-code XTS --name "Test Currency" \
  --numeric-code 963 --modified-by operator \
  --currency-type fiat

# Delete a currency by ISO code
ores.cli refdata currencies delete --iso-code XTS

# Export all currencies to a file
ores.cli refdata currencies export --output currencies.json

This chapter documented the currency entity end to end. ISO 4217 provides the standard identity — code, numeric code, name, minor units — and OreStudio's extensions cover what the standard leaves out: market tiers, monetary natures for digital assets, display formatting, and rounding conventions. The Qt windows manage the records under the full data quality regime of the previous chapter, the three auxiliary classification tables govern the values a currency may reference, and the shell and CLI expose the same operations for scripted use. Currencies are the template: subsequent entity chapters follow this same shape.

• ISO 4217 Currency Codes — the international standard for currency identification.
• SIX Financial Information — the ISO 4217 maintenance agency.
• MSCI Market Classification — framework for developed, emerging, and frontier market designations.