General Investment: enable and configure

General Investment is a money-moving earn product that ships with core. A customer picks a plan, picks a term, hands you the principal from their wallet, and an hourly job pays them out when the term ends. It has its own route (/investment), its own admin screens under Finance → Investment Management, twenty-four admin endpoints, eight customer endpoints, its own settlement cron and fifteen permission keys.

Nothing seeds its master switch, so on a fresh install it is off and every purchase is refused. This page is the checklist for turning it on properly, or off completely.

The feature switch

Admin → System → Platform Settings → Features → Investment.

Two things read it, and only two:

• The purchase endpoint reads it on every buy. Off, and the request is refused with 403 Investment feature is currently disabled before the plan is even looked up. This is a server-side refusal, not a hidden button.
• The customer menu hides the Investments → Investment Plans entry that points at /investment.

Everything else stays where it is. The /investment pages still resolve if a customer has the URL, the plans still list, the admin screens still work, and — importantly — positions already running still settle. The settlement cron does not consult this switch. Turning the feature off stops new money coming in; it does not strand or accelerate the money already in.

That is the behaviour you want when withdrawing a product from sale. It is not what you want if you are trying to stop payouts, and there is no switch that does that.

The KYC gate

The purchase route calls assertKycFeature with one of two feature ids:

Both go through the same endpoint. The forex branch creates rows the Forex addon's own cron settles, so gating the whole endpoint on invest_general would have let a verification level that you explicitly denied invest_forex open forex positions through this door instead. That is why one route names two features.

The gate is inert unless both master switches are on: KYC Verification (kycStatus) and Enforce KYC Feature Access (kycFeatureEnforcement). The second is off on every existing install by design — see Settings reference — so on a stock platform nobody is checked here at all. Turn it on only after reviewing every level in the level builder, because a level that does not list invest_general loses the ability to invest the moment you save.

The refusal a customer sees is "KYC verification is required to invest".

The settlement cron

processGeneralInvestments runs every hour, from the cron process, and is registered in backend/src/cron/index.ts alongside the other core jobs. It is a core job: it is loaded unconditionally in the scheduler's constructor, needs no extension row, and appears on System → System Monitoring → Scheduled Tasks as Process General Investments on every install.

Two consequences an operator meets in support tickets:

• A term ending is not a payout. A position that matures at 14:05 is paid on the next run, not at 14:05. Up to an hour of "why has my investment not completed" is normal and correct.
• A dead scheduler is invisible from the website. The site serves pages perfectly while nothing settles. Investments pile up ACTIVE past their endDate, and the only two places that say so are the Scheduled Tasks screen and the Overdue Settlements card on the investment history desk.

Viewing the job needs view.cron; triggering it by hand needs manage.cron. The mechanics of what a run actually does — the ROI it pays, the outcome it applies, what happens when one row fails — are in The general investment lifecycle.

Permissions

Fifteen keys, five verbs across three objects. None of them is granted to any role by default.

Grant access and view for a screen together or the table opens empty and never fetches a row. That failure is silent — no error, no banner. See Roles and permissions.

Where it appears in the admin

The menu group is Finance → Investment Management, with three entries:

A role sees the group if it holds any of those three keys, and only the entries it holds.

There is no /admin/finance/investment index page. Typing that URL is a dead end; the product has three leaf screens and no landing screen of its own. The shortcut from the customer-facing investment pages therefore points at /admin/finance/investment/plan.

Note the third entry is labelled Investment Analytics in the navigation but is the investment history table with an analytics header on it. Same screen, two names.

What else fires when an investment moves

Three side systems hang off this product. Each fails independently — a failure in any of them is logged and never blocks or reverses the money.

Affiliate rewards. Two conditions in backend/src/utils/affiliate.ts belong to this product: INVESTMENT, paid to the buyer's referrer at purchase time, and GENERAL_INVESTMENT, paid at settlement. Both are event-driven — they are triggered inline by the route and the cron, and the affiliate addon's periodic evaluator deliberately skips them, because paying from both paths meant every referrer was paid twice under two different idempotency keys. If you configure a reward for one of these conditions, expect it once per event, not once per period.

Email. Purchases send NewInvestmentCreated; cancellations send InvestmentCanceled; settlement sends InvestmentCompleted. Templates live on System → Communication Tools → Notification Templates.

In-app notification. Settlement creates one linking to /investment/<id>, with a View Investment action. It is typed system — stored as SYSTEM, normal priority. The platform does have an INVESTMENT notification type carrying high priority, but it is used by the AI Investments, Forex and ICO products, not by this one, so these notices sort with ordinary system messages rather than above them.

Turning the product off completely

There is no single kill switch, and the three levers do different things:

Nothing here retires a running position. To wind one down early, the customer cancels it (principal refunded, no ROI) — or you let the term run out. Do not reach for the status actions on the history desk to do it for them; they do not move money.