Record a loan payment

Every loan payment has two parts: interest, which is the cost of borrowing, and principal, which is the part that lowers what you owe. Tap Pay on the debt, enter the whole payment, and Tavala splits it for you. You can overtype the interest with the figure on your statement.

Record a payment

1. Open the Money tab and find the debt under Debts.
2. Tap Pay on its card. The screen is titled Pay and the debt's name.
3. Enter the Payment amount: the total you paid. The currency code beside the field is the currency of the wallet the money came from.
4. Check From. It starts as your first spending wallet. Tap it to pick another; only spending wallets are listed.
5. Check Of which interest. If the debt has a rate, the field is filled in and the note under it reads "Prefilled as one month at 12.00% APR on what you still owe - overtype your statement’s figure." Type the interest from your statement to replace it. If the debt has no rate, tap Add interest to show the field; left alone, the whole payment goes against the debt.
6. Read the line under the fields, for example €50.00 interest · €150.00 pays the debt down.
7. Check Payment date. It starts as today and cannot be in the future. Pick an earlier day to record a payment you made then.
8. Tap Record payment.

When a payment clears the debt, Tavala shows a message that the debt is paid off.

Interest and principal

Say you owe €5,000 at 12% APR. One month of interest is €5,000 × 12% ÷ 12 = €50.

The first figure is the interest slice. Tavala takes one month of interest on what you still owe, at the rate in force on the payment date, and never more than the payment itself. The rest is principal. A payment smaller than one month of interest is all interest, so the debt does not fall. That is also why the debt's card can say "this balance won’t shrink" when the monthly payment is too low.

If the rate changes on a date you set under Add a rate change or promo period, the split uses the rate that applies on the payment date. Changing Payment date recalculates the prefilled interest, unless you have already typed your own figure.

What Tavala records

One payment saves two things, and Activity shows them as a single entry:

• Interest becomes an expense in the wallet you paid from, in an expense category called Interest. Tavala creates that category the first time it is needed. Interest counts as Spending and as Money out, and reports show it as Loan interest.
• Principal becomes a transfer from that wallet to the debt. It lowers what you owe. It counts as Money out, shown as Loan principal in reports, but not as Spending, because the money has moved to pay down a debt and was not consumed.

The wallet you paid from goes down by the whole payment, so What's Left on Home goes down by the whole payment too. See what the numbers mean.

Good to know

• Prefilled interest is an estimate. It is one month on the current balance, whatever the date of your last payment. Your lender's statement is the authority, so overtype it.
• Paying from a wallet in another currency. The principal is converted into the debt's currency at the rate for the payment date. If no rate exists yet, Tavala says "No exchange rate for this pair yet - try later." and saves nothing.
• Overpayment warning. If the debt has overpayment terms, a strip under the amount says how much of the payment is over the yearly allowance and the early-repayment charge to expect. It is a heads-up and never blocks Record payment.
• Recurring payments. A recurring transfer from a wallet into the debt is split into interest and principal in the same way when it falls due. See add a bill or a recurring payment.
• Undo. To take a payment back, remove its entry in Activity; that removes both parts. See edit, delete or undo a transaction.
• Payments you made in the past. To load many at once from a spreadsheet, see import debts from a CSV file.