Debts you owe and debts owed to you
Debts is where loans live: the mortgage, the car, the money you lent a friend, the money your sister owes you.
Every debt is an account, so its balance follows the same rule as everywhere else: opening plus every movement, never a counter maintained by hand.
The two directions
The first decision when you create one is the direction, and everything else is worded around it:
- I owe, a loan. Its balance is negative, and it goes up towards zero as you pay.
- I am owed, a receivable. Its balance is positive, and it goes down as you collect.
The direction is fixed once created. Changing it would invert the sign of everything already recorded.
What you enter
The counterparty, a bank, a shop, a person. What it is about. The total amount, and how much is already paid or already received, which becomes the opening balance so the debt starts at what is genuinely outstanding.
Optionally: the interest rate, the number of instalments or the agreed instalment amount, the payment day of the month, and whether you want a reminder.
An informal debt with no rate and no instalment is perfectly valid. Not every debt has a schedule.
Interest that matches the statement
Interest is where debt trackers usually lose people, because the app's number never matches the bank's. Ours asks for the things that make them agree:
- The rate as your bank quotes it, with its unit, since an annual effective rate and a monthly rate are very different numbers wearing similar labels.
- The date interest starts running, which is rarely the day you created the debt in the app.
- Interest accrues by day, in the periods the debt actually has, not as a flat monthly guess.
It is still an estimate, and the app calls it one. Your bank applies withholdings, rounding and day count conventions that are theirs.
Paying
A payment is a transfer: money leaves the account you pay from and reduces the debt. It is not an expense, because the expense already happened when you took the loan or bought the thing.
The debt's balance moves, your account's balance moves, and your monthly spending is left alone.
Debts stay out of your net worth
Debt accounts do not enter the balance figures on Home, in Transactions or in Reports. They have their own module with its own totals.
That is deliberate. Blending a mortgage into "how much do I have" produces a number that is technically defensible and completely useless for deciding whether you can buy lunch.
Reminders
With a payment day set, you get a monthly reminder. Where a rate exists, the reminder includes the estimated interest, so the notification tells you something you did not already know.
When it is settled
A debt that reaches zero is archived by itself. It stays in the history, it stops occupying the screen.