GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 746998
"Months Remaining" spinbox in Loan Assistant is non-obvious, poorly placed, and poorly documented.
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:39:56 UTC
I have a loan that started in Jan 1, 2010. After I setup the amortization at the review stage everything is fine. The amortization starts with the correct dates and correct Principal and interest amounts. the issues is when the schedule is run, in the loan register (also the created transactions) the amounts are incorrect. The amounts for the first entry (Jan 1, 2010) is that of the most recent month on the bank statement. Reviewing the schedule shows the start date to be still Jan 1, 2010. the calculation must not be using this field and defaulting to current date.
On the first page of the loan assistant in the lower-right corner is a spinbox labeled "Months Remaining". It defaults to the number of months left on the loan if you were current on your payments on the day that you're running the assistant; if you want to create transactions for all of the loan payments change that number to the full life of the loan. E.g., for a 5-year loan you'd change it to "60'. This could be done better by moving that box to the repayments page and automatically recalculating it based on the first payment entry, assuming that the loan is current as of *that* date. The documentation in the help manual also needs work.
I've added a tooltip for Months Remaining and documented it and Repayement Start Date more thoroughly in the Help manual, both will be in the next release. The Repayment Start Date is part of a frequency widget used in several places so I don't want to mess with it in the stable series and there's no good place elsewhere on the Repayment page to which to move Months Remaining, so that will have to wait.
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