A country runs on its treasury - the shared pot of money we usually call the budget - and this is where owning a private country feels most different from living in a public one. In a public country, you will remember, the budget is strictly automatic: it fills only from taxes and drains only into bonuses, and nobody can ever reach in and move it by hand. A private owner has no such restriction. The treasury is theirs to steer directly, and the Treasury section of the console is where that steering happens. It holds the country's local currency, its gold, and any other currencies it has come to own.
Deposit and withdraw
The two most basic treasury powers are deposit and withdraw, and they are exactly what they sound like. Deposit moves money out of your own personal wallet and into the state budget - this is how an owner funds their country, topping up the pot so it has the means to pay bonuses, buy goods or fund its citizens. Withdraw does the reverse, moving money from the budget back into your own wallet. Because the owner can take money out as well as put it in, profits a country earns can flow back to the player who runs it. Every deposit and every withdrawal is written into the treasury ledger, so there is always an honest, readable record of how the country's money has moved.
This is a genuinely different relationship with the budget than a citizen of a public country ever has. There, the budget is a ledger you read but can never spend. Here, it is a working account the owner actively manages - funding it when it needs money and drawing on it when it has earned some. It is one of the clearest expressions of what ownership really means.
A budget that trades and exchanges gold
The treasury is not a pot that just sits there. Through the Market & Gold section, the country's own money can buy and sell on the market - raw materials, products, even people - in whatever quantity the owner wants, and it can exchange gold for currency just as a player can. In other words the budget is a trader in its own right. An owner can use the country's money to stock up on goods the country needs, to sell off a surplus, or to convert between gold and local currency to fund whatever they are planning. Anything the treasury buys is delivered into the country warehouse, called Treasury Stock, which is simply the store of everything the country owns as opposed to anything a private citizen holds.
The country is a player too
A private treasury can do much of what an ordinary player can: it can trade on the market in any quantity and exchange gold for currency. Goods it buys land in Treasury Stock, the national warehouse. The budget is an active economic actor, not a frozen reserve.
Sending coins and goods to anyone
The Transfers section is where the treasury reaches outward to actual people. From here the owner can send coins or currency straight out of the budget to any player in the game, and can send goods out of the warehouse to any player as well - delivered, in the case of goods, into that player's first town. The single most important word in that sentence is "any". The recipient does not have to be a citizen of the country. An owner can pay an ally on the other side of the world, reward a citizen for good work, seed a brand-new arrival with starting supplies, or settle a deal with someone who has never set foot in the country at all. The treasury's generosity is not fenced in by borders.
That reach is powerful, so it is worth thinking about how to use it well. Because every transfer spends the country's shared money, a wise owner treats the budget the way a careful steward treats any treasury: funding things that strengthen the country, paying fairly for work that helps it grow, and keeping enough in reserve to honour the bonuses citizens are counting on. Nothing forces you to be prudent - the controls will happily let you empty the pot - but a country whose treasury is managed thoughtfully is a country people actually want to live in.
Transfers cross every border
Coins and goods sent from the treasury can go to any player at all, citizen or stranger. Goods arrive in the recipient's first town. This is how an owner funds allies, pays for work and welcomes newcomers - to anyone, anywhere.
Put the treasury powers together and you have a country whose money genuinely works. The owner funds it by depositing and draws on it by withdrawing; the budget trades and exchanges gold to build up whatever the country needs; and transfers let it pay out to players anywhere in the world. In the final lesson we turn from money to people and rules - who lives in the country, who may join, and how an owner sets the law.