A contract represents a deal. A transaction represents a cash flow.

A contract could be a spot or term physical deal, an OTC derivative deal, or an exchange agreement.

One or more contract items represent the commodities for the deal.

CoreTRM auto-synchronizes contracts to transactions. For example, a swap contract for one year with monthly settlement is sync'd as 12 Transactions. Physical term contracts are an exception and require transactions to be added manually as needed.

The book hierarchy can have multiple levels from the total organization at the top to a specific area of business n-levels below.

Contracts are owned by books for searching and security.

Transactions are matched into mark-to-market groups for reporting and balance position maintenance.

Mark-to-market groups are owned by strategies which in turn are owned by books. For example, a strategy could consist of a physical match and a derivatives hedge match.