Today I am writing about a standard Treasury functionality that I personally find very useful, but that a lot of people in Treasury and Commodity Risk Management do not know about.

References.

References or Object Links are set between Financial Transactions, Loans or Security Classes of certain Security Accounts. Any number of those can be added to a reference using this standard functionality.

Although this functionality was originally intended differently it offers a great way to link financial transactions. This can e.g., be used to have Options linked together to symbolize a Collar.

But let me show you what I mean in the system.

Let us try to create a Collar within the system and visualize it via an Object Link. For that I have created the Call Option 38 and the Put Option 39. As seen below.

Now I can go to transaction “Create Reference” (transaction code is TBR6) and there create the link as following.

With that link in place, I can now go to transaction “Transaction Display” (FTR_DISPLAY) and there we find the Object Links under Environment -> Object Links.

Maybe not the nicest way to display those, but what if you would have an additional tab showing those links? Maybe even filtered on the Reference Category that you have defined for Collars? Luckily there are the additional Tabs in FTR_DISPLAY that can be implemented:

Much better if you ask me.

For the Collar use case you could either use the standard Reference Category “OPT – Options” or you could create your own one. For that you need to add to table ATR1 your own Reference Type within the customer namespace. Afterwards you are good to go.

All in all, a handy function with low cost of implementation if you ask me.
What do you think? Ever worked with this functionality? Or how did you approach similar use cases like maintaining Collars?