Track who owes me money; money loaned out

dereckmezquita

I’m just looking for a way to be able to track who owes me money.

These are informal loans for example to my brother or family members. Is there a feature for this or a category I should use or something like this.
I am aware of the refund tracker but is this what I should be using?

DannyB

Hi @dereckmezquita

Assuming you want to track this information in Simplifi, here are a some ideas you could think about or try:

1. Set up a manual loan account with the original balance and then make payments to the loan whenever your receive payments toward paying of the loan. This would be if you expect multiple incremental payments over time.
2. Create an expense transaction in the account you loaned the funds from and and then set up a "refund expected" reminder for when you expect the loan to be repaid. This would be if the agreement is that the full amount will be paid back in one lump sum.
3. Another idea that might work is to set up a Savings Goal with a target amount equal to the loan amount and whenever you receive payment you could make a contribution to the SG. You will be able to see the progress of repayment as your SG contributions add up over time. Once fully repaid you could make a withdrawal for another purpose to return the funds to whatever bank account is holding the repayment funds.

Those are a few ideas and I have no clue if any one of them will work for what you want to do.

Another option would be to use a spread sheet. You could create a summary sheet along with a sheet for each loan and use those sheets to track repayment.

Flopbot

@dereckmezquita ,

Danny provided some great info - as always. I’ll throw in my 2 cents as well.

I don’t have much experience with this situation, but once we did make a purchase for someone who was supposed to pay us back - they never did. In that case, I utilized Simplifi’s “Refunds” feature with some success. It certainly didn’t feel like a workaround or anything.

I’d recommend trying the Refunds module out for smaller loans that are likely to be paid back in one shot.

Pros:

• Didn’t seem like a work around.
• On the “due date”, it displayed the money they owed me in the my Spending Plan and on my account’s Projected Balance graph.
• Organizes all your personal loans into one spot.

Cons:

• If the person doesn’t pay you back on the due date, you have to change the date on the refund or else it will throw off your account’s Projected Balance graph. Not a big deal, but it can get tedious if they don’t pay you back repeatedly.