Community Discussion: Quicken Lending tool not calculating correctly

Community Discussion: Quicken Lending tool not calculating correctly

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I believe there is a problem in Quicken's creation of lending loans, but not the problem reported by the original poster in the above discussion.

When Quicken creates a loan where the user is the borrower, Quicken will create a loan schedule that assumes that any payments already due have been made.

Thus (for example), if the real-world "borrower loan" was created two payment periods before entering the loan in Quicken, the Quicken Full Loan Payment Schedule will have two less payments than the loan requires ... because Quicken assumes that those two payments were already made. When this situation occurs, the Quicken loan account will have an Adjustment transaction for the amount of the payments assumed to have already been made. That Adjustment transaction will appear just following the opening balance transaction in the Loan account. I believe this is the correct way setup loans in Quicken - both borrower and lender loans.

But, when creating a loan where the Quicken user is the lender, the results may be slightly different.

To create a Quicken "lender" loan, the user must first create a Quicken Asset account for the amount of the loan, as of the starting date of the real-world loan. Once that asset account has been created, in the to-become a lending loan Asset account "Actions" dropdown, the user needs to select, "Convert to lending loan".

When the resulting lending loan has been successfully created, its Full Loan Payment Schedule will include all payments, regardless of when the loan was initiated in the real-world or created in Quicken. But the "next" (scheduled) loan payment will NOT necessarily be the "first" payment due for the loan; it will be the next payment due AFTER the Quicken loan creation date. Thus the scheduled loan payment transaction sequence may begin too late (bypassing any payments that should have been made before the loan was created in Quicken), then will have the final payment due later than the real-world payment should be due.

I tested in R39.23, R42.19 and R42.21 and each produced the results described above.

My tests lead me to believe that the original poster likely created a loan where the Quicken user is the borrower, rather than the lender.

The original poster refers to a "built in lending tool" and implies that the loan was created according to Quicken's instructions for creating a lending loan. But I suspect those directions were not followed and that is what caused the problem.

The initial step to create a lending loan is to create a Quicken Asset account. But during the process of creating that asset account, Quicken will ask the user if there is a loan against the account, to which the user must say NO. If, instead, the user answers YES, and completes that loan creation process, the user will create a "borrower loan", NOT a "lender loan". And, as noted above, a "borrower loan will only create a payment schedule for payments that Quicken assumes have not already been made.

The Type of loan account created by the original poster is simple enough to determine: a true lender loan account will be a Quicken Asset account, displayed in the Account List/Account Bar with other Quicken assets - and the loan payment transaction created by Quicken for a lender loan will be a deposit to the Quicken payment account, rather than a withdrawal.

[At the time of this post, the original poster has not provided the details of the technique used to setup the loan, the "terms" used for the loan, the resulting Quicken "Account type", or the algebraic sign of the loan payment transaction created by Quicken; so what actually happened is largely speculation.]
Reply to
John Pollard
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The last sentence above should read: "When this situation occurs, the Quicken loan account will have an Adjustment transaction for the [total principal] amount of the payments assumed to have already been made."

Reply to
John Pollard

For those following along, the original poster in the referenced Community discussion, having gotten no responses to the original complaint, has now started a new discussion for the same subject.

Community discussion: Error in lending loan calculations

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The new problem description does not provide any additional useful information; but the new discussion did garner one response ... a response which demonstrates that Quicken is correctly handling lender-loans.

Reply to
John Pollard

Finally the original poster has supplied some "additional useful information", which has allowed both SuperUser splasher and I to create the same loan in our Quicken files. And we do not experience any problems. So at this point, I fail to see any Quicken issue.

[Note: this loan, unlike most loans created in Quicken, has a start date in the future (it appears the original poster began setting up this loan back in July 2022, with a Start Date of September 2022).]

SuperUser splasher notes that the original poster's image of the Loan Payment Schedule shows a pair of offsetting $10,000 entries ($10,000 being the amount of the loan) occurring on the Start Date of the loan (prior to the first scheduled loan payment). Those entries probably should not be there: they may be involved in incorrectly pushing the correct initial loan payment date from 9/1/2022 to 10/1/2022, and perhaps causing Quicken to assume the loan will be paid off in August 2027, when the payoff should occur in September 2027.

[There is also another entry that should not be in that Payment Schedule; namely a -$26,586.67 entry dated 5/5/2019. That entry is even more problematic and difficult to explain: perhaps the op has attempted to re-use an existing account that had previous activity.]

I believe the original poster should:

- submit an image of the final Loan Schedule payments

- submit an image of the loan account register

- attempt to explain the offsetting $10,000 entries, and the $26,586.67 entry

Reply to
John Pollard

The original poster should also consider deleting the existing loan/loan account and starting over from scratch (including creating a new Quicken Asset account for the lender-loan).

Reply to
John Pollard

Please ignore my phrase " ... they may be involved in incorrectly pushing the correct initial loan payment transaction date from 9/1/2022 to 10/1/2022 ....".

Using the original poster's loan Terms, Quicken will default to scheduling the first loan payment on 10/2/2022.

Reply to
John Pollard

My original guess about the cause of the original poster's problem was wrong.

I was right that the the op did not follow the instructions for setting up a lender-loan, but the op did not unintentionally create a borrower-loan.

Instead, the op incorrectly tried to use a pre-existing Quicken asset account with one or more previously entered transactions - transactions entered before establishing the amount of the loan, which should be the opening balance assigned to the asset account when the asset account is created.

In the end (as of Sept 5, 2022), the op continues to believe that there is some Quicken problem, when there is not.

It's true that Quicken can only handle loans of one type: namely, loans that operate on the principals of traditional mortgage loans. But Quicken has never suggested otherwise. I have lost count of the times that users have been told (in this newsgroup and in the various Quicken forums/communities) that users can only expect Quicken to handle that specific (traditional mortgage) loan type.

The user in the referenced Community discussion, should have done more testing and asked some questions in the Quicken Community BEFORE deciding how to handle the loan. That would have given the op the information necessary to make an agreement with the borrower that would have conformed to Quicken's loan capabilities.

[In my quick test, I determined that if the op had created a new Quicken asset account with an opening balance equal to the actual loan amount (and no other transactions), and let the payments begin one month after the opening date of the loan (as Quicken does by default); the resulting Quicken loan payment schedule would have been usable. And the op even says he can duplicate those results (as reported by SuperUser splasher).]

If a loan that conformed to Quicken's capabilities would not have been acceptable to the lender or the borrower, the op would have known that Quicken could not help with the loan.

Reply to
John Pollard

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