The book entries are financial operations that an issuing financial entity performs by registering an accounting movement. It is a way of recording titles and securities in a computerized registry.
They are generally used for public debt and Treasury products for sale. They began to be used at the end of the 80s in Spain and replaced the annotations of paper transactions.
Actors involved in a book entry
When book entries are made, several elements are involved in the recording of transactions.
On the one hand, the Annotations Center acts as a central registry that is attached to the country's central bank, which is in charge of its management. In this central all the issues of the public Treasury, of the different communities and regions and of the public organizations that can get into debt are registered. The Central guarantees the issuance, supports it, values and evaluates the conditions, executes the payments and amortizes the public debt.
On the other hand, the managing entities register the values individually for each client. They create what are called vouchers or receipts with the name of the right holder. These receipts cannot be sold or negotiated with them since they do not represent the title, but they will prove the nominal ownership using the annotation.
Advantages of using book entries
Using this transaction recording system has several advantages. First, it eliminates the use of physical paper, thus saving and facilitating records. To use this type of annotations, the intervention of a public notary is not necessary, so it helps to speed up the circulation of the title in the secondary markets. Public administrations are also favored by facilitating the circuit of finance, so they work more efficiently.
At present, almost all public debt records are made using book entries.