Report Question - Payment Distribution vs. Investor Report

Handling payments and adjustments, running reports, doing your accounting with Moneylender.
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wtech_josh
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Posts: 101
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2019 7:17 pm

Report Question - Payment Distribution vs. Investor Report

Post by wtech_josh »

On one of our loans the borrower made a $3000 payment and on the payment distribution it shows the $3000 going to principal but on the investor report for that month it only shows the regular payment amount not the full payment that was made in that month. Assuming that it carried forward I ran an investor report from 8/1/21 through 12/1/9999 and it showed $3000 plus the regular payment. Can you tell me why it shows that way on the investor report?

And is there a way to run a distribution report with all loans on one page instead of individual reports?
wtech_josh
Site Admin
Posts: 101
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2019 7:17 pm

Re: Report Question - Payment Distribution vs. Investor Report

Post by wtech_josh »

The answer is complicated, buckle up!

In Moneylender there’s a division between “settings type records” and “transaction type records”. Settings records are anything you can create and edit – everything on the Settings and Payments tabs, for example (payments, principal, escrow, adjustments, late fee settings, other charges, interest rate settings, the loan settings themselves, variable interest rates, etc. – everything that you can feed into Moneylender to tell it what you want to happen with your loan). Moneylender’s calculation engine takes those settings records and generates all the transaction records that represent the various balances on a loan.

Each loan has seven or more separate but related balances that Moneylender treats the same way you might think of your bank balance. For example, a loan has a “principal” balance, which is all the principal owed on a loan. The principal account has transactions that increase or decrease the principal – lending money to the borrower increases the balance of the principal account on a loan, and when part of a payment pays down the principal, that part of the payment decreases the principal balance. Similarly, there’s an “overall/ledger” balance, and when you loan principal it also increases the overall balance on the loan. And the principal is always interest bearing so it also increases the “interest bearing” balance on a loan. Thus, one principal setting will generate three transactions – one for each account affected by this increased principal. Similarly, a single payment record creates several transactions – the part that pays fees will create a negative transaction on the fees account, a part that goes towards escrow creates a transaction on the escrow account as well as the escrow due account, the part that pays interest creates a transaction that decreases the interest, the principal part of the payment will decrease the principal balance, if it is a regular or interest only payment it will also create a transaction in the amount due account, and the entire payment also shows up on the overall account. There might even be a couple more accounts that are affected by a single payment record. Even something as simple as a fee adjustment creates two transactions – affecting the fee balance and also affecting the amount due.

Each payment record has fields that Moneylender will automatically populate with the amounts of the payment that were assigned to fees, escrow, interest and principal. These numbers are part of the payment record itself. When you run a payment distribution report, Payment Details report engine responsible for that report is generating columns based on the payment records and the properties set on those payment records. Further, the date range limits the included payments based on the payment date that you set when you enter the payment.

The Financial Summary report engine that powers most of the accounting/overview type reports, including the Investor Report, report the transactions on accounts on each loan. The totals you get are not derived from the payment records, but from the transactions generated by the payment records. There’s a mechanic most of Moneylender’s loan calculation engines that will hold a payment until an upcoming due date if that loan is relatively current. This is to allow a payment on the 30th to pay all the things that happen on the 1st of the month, instead of just paying principal only and then making the loan look like it still had a payment due when the due date happened a couple days later. It’s a very important mechanic in the loan engines. In these cases, while the payment is received on the 30th, the transactions it generates occur on the due date for which the payment was held.

As a result, you’ll see the payment in the August payment report, but the transactions in the September transactions report.

The “regular payment plus the $3000” is likely because a payment for the regular amount in July generated its transactions on August 1st, so it’s getting picked up in the investor report.

The Payment Summary report engine is what you’re looking for with your second question. The Payment Reconciliation report is a report that ships with Moneylender that uses this engine. You can add all the same columns to this report that you can add to a payment details report (and also borrower, loan, and lender columns). Just like the Payment Distribution, the Reconciliation report will filter the payments by their payment date.

Fun tip: you can see every single transaction on each account from the Ledger Transactions report. Use the Show Account drop-down at the top left of the report window to choose what account you want to see. Transactions usually have some helpful detail in their description to clue you in to the setting that generated them. For payments, you’ll see whatever you entered in the payment description in the transaction descriptions as well.

Thanks for the questions. Let me know if there’s anything else you need. 😊
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