What is your idle cash costing you?
Cash does not look like a mistake. It sits in the operating account of the holdings company, in the sweep at the trust, in the foundation’s grant reserve, and in the personal accounts nobody consolidates. Each balance is reasonable on its own. Added up, families routinely hold 8–15% of capital in cash without anyone having decided to.
IGNITION is the framework that asks the question every quarter and answers it in seconds: how much capital is idle, where, for how long, and what that costs against the return you told yourself you expected.
Four data points and a flag.
Idle capital by entity
Every cash and cash-equivalent position across every legal entity and custodian, with days idle.
Cost of drag
Idle balance × your policy hurdle rate. Not a market forecast — your own stated expectation, applied to your own book.
Deployment velocity
How long committed or earmarked capital actually takes to move, by decision and by entity.
The flag
One sentence when cash crosses the threshold you set, with the number that crossed it.
What the answer looks like.
A fictional book, the real mechanism. The headline, the data, the flag, and the source chain — in that order, every time.
| Dynasty Trust | $6.6M | above claims · 4.1% | |
| Holdings LLC | $2.2M | after $9.5M of expected calls and $2.3M it owes Ventures as owner · 0.2% | |
| Foundation | $2.4M | grants only · 0.0% | |
| Personal joint | $0 | after Q4 estimated tax and the principal's 10% of Ventures' call | |
| Ventures LLC | $2.5M | calls with no cash, paid by its owners; $29K unmet | WARNING |
$33.0M in cash; $21.8M of it is already spoken for: the $6.0M reserve, $12.0M of capital calls and dated bills, and cash owners pass to the entities they fund. $11.2M is idle, $397K a year short of the 6% hurdle after what each account already earns; $8.7M of it has no recorded claim on it, the rest is the foundation's, for grants. Counting cash against the reserve alone says $1.3M: that treats cash the funds will call as idle.
- Cash positions · 5 rows · by entity
- Fund commitments · $34.0M unfunded · pacing model
- Hurdle rate 6.0% · IPS §4.2 · approved
- Operating reserve $6.0M · minutes of 14 March 2026 · approved
- Sealed · one fingerprint over the book, the policy, the engine and the question
A different question, not a better chart.
A consolidated reporting dashboard shows cash as an asset class: a slice of a pie chart, usually a small one. It is not wrong. It is just not the question. The question is what that slice costs against the hurdle in your investment policy statement, and which entity is holding it, and since when. That requires joining positions to policy to entities, which is a framework, not a widget.
The number, then the decision.
You open the portal, the number is there, and the four lines under it tell you which account to move first. The framework runs again next week against the new book. The number should go down. If it does not, you will know exactly where it stayed.
IGNITION, answered.
How does ParetoAlpha define idle cash?
Cash and cash equivalents held above the operating reserve you set, measured per entity and per account, with days since the balance last moved. You control the reserve and the hurdle rate; the framework applies them.
Does it recommend where to invest the cash?
No. ParetoAlpha quantifies the cost of holding it and shows which accounts are holding it. Deployment decisions stay with you and your advisors. Nothing on the platform moves money.
What data does IGNITION need?
Read-only position data from Plaid, your custodian, or your advisor's reporting platform, plus the hurdle rate and reserve from your policy statement. Most families are running it in the first week.