How to Record a Payment in Family Loan Tracker

This guide explains how to mark a payment as paid in Family Loan Tracker, catch up on several missed payments at once, and what happens behind the scenes when you do.

A loan's dashboard is only as accurate as the payments logged against it. If a payment happened in real life — cash handed over, a bank transfer sent — but hasn't been recorded in the tracker, the dashboard will still show it as due or overdue. Recording payments promptly is what keeps the numbers honest for both sides.

Step 1: Open the loan's payment schedule

From your dashboard, open the loan you want to update. The payment schedule lists every payment due over the life of the loan, in order, each with its due date and amount. Payments that have already been recorded are marked as paid; the next unpaid payment is highlighted as the one currently due.

Step 2: Mark a single payment as paid

Find the payment you want to record and select the option to mark it paid. You'll be asked to confirm the payment date — this defaults to today but can be backdated if the payment actually happened earlier. You can also add a note, which is useful for documenting how the payment was made (cash, bank transfer, check) or any relevant context.

Once confirmed, the payment status updates immediately, and the loan's dashboard stats — paid principal, paid interest, and progress — recalculate to reflect it.

Step 3: Catch up with a batch payment

If several scheduled payments have built up — for example, after a few months of informal cash payments that were never logged — you don't need to record each one individually. Select the batch payment option, choose the range of payments you're catching up on, and confirm. The tracker applies each payment in order against the schedule and updates all the affected stats in one pass.

This is the fastest way to bring a loan's records back in line with reality without re-entering the same information payment by payment.

Step 4: Confirmation emails

When a payment is recorded, both the lender and the borrower receive a confirmation email summarizing what was paid, when, and the updated remaining balance. This gives both parties a shared, timestamped record that doesn't depend on memory or a single person's bookkeeping — useful if a dispute about what was or wasn't paid ever comes up.

If only one party is using the tracker, inviting the other party means they get these confirmations automatically going forward, rather than having to ask for updates.

What happens to the rest of the schedule

Recording a regular, on-time payment doesn't change anything else about the loan's terms — the remaining schedule and total interest figure stay the same, since the loan is amortizing exactly as planned. Payments beyond the regular scheduled amount work differently: they reduce principal ahead of schedule and recalculate everything downstream. Our guide on recalculating a loan after extra payments walks through exactly what shifts in the schedule when that happens; the dedicated guide on logging an extra payment in the tracker itself is coming soon.

A note on trial accounts

Trial accounts can record a limited number of payments before being prompted to upgrade. If you're testing the tracker with a real loan that already has payment history, it's worth checking your plan's limits before importing months of backlog, so you don't get partway through a batch catch-up and hit a wall.

Keeping the record accurate

The tracker reflects what's been entered, not what's actually happened — a payment made outside the app doesn't update anything until someone records it. The habit that matters most is recording payments close to when they happen, rather than batching them up for months. A loan with a consistently current payment history is also the strongest kind of documentation if a family loan's legitimacy is ever questioned, whether by a tax authority or just a relative with a different memory of events.

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