Recording loans and repayments
Most loans go into LoanCompass after the money has already changed hands, often months later. Nothing here assumes you started on day one — you record what you lent, backdate it to when you lent it, add the repayments that have happened since, and the balance catches up on its own.
Adding the person
A name is the only required field. Everything else — email, phone, notes — is there because it is useful later, not because the ledger needs it.
- Email is what makes the borrower side of the product work. Record one and that person can hold an account, see their own loans, get reminders before each due date, and propose repayments. Leave it out and the loan is a private record only you can see, which is a perfectly normal way to use this.
- Phone is used to compose a text reminder when you choose to send one. It is never messaged automatically.
You are recording information about someone else. Enter what you need to run the loan and no more, keep it accurate, and delete it when the loan is settled and you no longer need it. If they ask you to remove their details, do it — the privacy policy covers how.
Recording the loan
- Amount and currency. The currency is fixed per loan and every total is reported per currency. LoanCompass never converts between currencies — there is no exchange rate anywhere in the product — so lending in two currencies gives you two separate figures rather than one blended and slightly wrong one.
- The date you lent it. Backdate this freely. It is what the schedule and any overdue reckoning are measured from, so a loan entered today but made in March should say March.
- A due date, or a plan. Either a single date the whole amount is due, or one of the six monthly repayment plans.
- A monthly interest rate, if you charge one. Leave it empty for an interest-free loan. Rates here are always monthly.
The full schedule — every installment, the interest in each, the running balance — is shown before the loan is created, not after. If the numbers are not what you expected, that is the moment to change the plan rather than the moment to discover it.
Logging repayments
Recording a repayment says money moved somewhere else — cash, a transfer, however you actually settled. LoanCompass does not move it and never sees it.
From the loan
Open the loan and enter the amount and the date. Use this whenever the amount is unusual, the date is not today, or you want to attach a note — a partial payment, a payment made three weeks ago, an overpayment.
From anywhere
The record-payment button in the header opens a short list of what is still owed this month across every borrower, overdue first. Pick the loan, confirm, done — it is for the common case where someone paid exactly what was due. Anything else leaves through a link to the full form on the loan itself.
From the borrower
A borrower with an account can propose a repayment from their own view: the amount and the date they say they paid. It lands in your inbox and changes nothing until you accept. Accepting writes the repayment, so the button says so.
Fixing a mistake
Everything derived — the balance, the remaining schedule, ahead or behind, what is due this month — is recalculated from the repayments, the charges and the terms every time it is displayed. Nothing is stored as a running total that could drift out of step. In practice that means:
- Delete a repayment you entered twice and the balance corrects itself immediately.
- Edit the term or the rate and the schedule is rebuilt from the new terms — while every repayment already recorded stays exactly as recorded.
- Backdate a payment you forgot and it takes effect from the date you give it, not the date you typed it.
When a loan will never be repaid
Sometimes the honest answer is that the money is gone. There is no “write off” button, and inventing one would be pretending the ledger knows something it does not. What people do in practice is either record a final repayment for the outstanding balance with a note saying it was forgiven — which closes the loan truthfully as settled between the two of you — or delete it outright if there is no reason to keep the record. Both are better than leaving arrears compounding against someone you have already decided not to chase.
Keep reading
- Repayment plansThe six monthly plans a loan can use, what each one does to the payment size, and how to pick between them.
- Interest rates are monthlyEvery rate in LoanCompass is per month, not per year. What that means for the figure you type in.
- OverpaymentsWhere the extra money goes when someone pays more than the installment, and what it does to the schedule.
- Late paymentsHow interest accrues on an overdue loan, once per month, and why it compounds on the balance rather than the principal.
Stop recalculating this by hand
LoanCompass keeps the schedule, the repayments and the running balance for every loan you have made, so the figures on this page stay current without you rebuilding them. It is free while in early access, and no money moves through it.