How to record a loan that started months ago

The typical loan is not recorded on day one. It is recorded on day two hundred, when you finally sit down to work out where things stand.

Most tools force you to start from today, which erases exactly the part you wanted to keep. Prestalo takes the original date and the history that came with it.

How it works

Creating a loan walks through three steps.

Step one is the loan itself: who, how much, which currency, what rate — and the date it actually started. Use the real date, not today's.

Step two asks whether there were earlier movements. This is where the partial repayments, the extra amounts you handed over, everything that already happened goes, each with its own date.

Step three is the one worth slowing down for. Before anything is saved, you see the whole history rebuilt day by day. Each month can be expanded to show the daily detail: the principal on every day, the interest that accrued, and each movement sitting on the exact date it happened.

What to check on the review screen

Two things in particular.

The monthly balances, collapsed, give you the shape: how the principal moved over time. If a month looks wrong, open it and find the day.

How each repayment was split. Money coming back does not always go entirely to principal. Every movement states plainly how much cleared interest and how much reduced principal. If a $500 repayment only dropped the balance by $420, the explanation is on that same line.

If something is off, you can go back without losing anything you entered. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

The most common mistake

Entering a movement dated before the loan itself.

This usually means the loan's start date is the wrong one, not the movement's — you thought it started in May and it actually started in March. People remember the day money moved far better than they remember when an arrangement began.

So the app flags it and offers to take you back to fix the start date, rather than nudging you to change the movement date that is probably correct.

After that

The loan carries its full history and the interest is current. From then on you only add new movements as they happen — dated when they happened, which is not necessarily today.

And you can share the record with the other person so you are both looking at the same thing.