Home Loan Interest Manager - Key Concepts

Key Concepts

Tip - The Quick Overview on our website is a great place to start if you want to find out more about what this software can do.

This key concepts help topic introduces the main areas of Home Loan Interest Manager Pro, including how to use it, loan and mortgage terminology, and an overview of the reports that will help you audit, summarize and plan all aspects of your mortgage.

As easy as 1, 2, 3

There are three simple steps to using Home Loan Interest Manager Pro:

Step 1 - Create An Account

Create an account for the loan or mortgage you wish to work with.

Step 2 - Enter Your Loan Information

Enter the historical loan information, including statements, transactions and interest rate changes.

Step 3 - Run The Reports

AUDIT - The audit reports will help you check the health of your loan.

SUMMARIZE - The summary reports will categorize your loan information so that you can discover the true cost of each of your loans.

PLAN - The planning reports let you enter "what-if" type scenarios for each loan. They can help you find out how to pay-off your mortgage sooner, show you what a change in repayments can do to the loan term, let you plan for interest rate rises, and much more.

Loan and Mortgage Terminology

In Home Loan Interest Manager Pro your loan and mortgage information is broken down into the following components:

1. An Account - This is the loan itself. For each loan you wish to work with you will create one account. For example if you have a mortgage and a line of credit then you would set up two accounts, one for each.
   
   Note: In Home Loan Interest Manager Pro an account balance should be set to a negative number when you owe money. Therefore all your loan and mortgage accounts will normally have negative balances.
2. Interest Rates - For each account you need to enter the interest rate changes. Home Loan Interest Manager Pro maintains a history of interest rate changes, therefore each time the rate changes you add a new value. If you have a fixed rate mortgage then you set up a single interest rate at the start of the fixed period.
3. Statements - Statements are used to hold the transactions for an account. For each statement you receive from your lender you create a statement in Home Loan Interest Manager Pro. For example, if your lender sends you a statement every six months, you would create one statement for each six-month period. If you don't receive statements, or you regularly download your transactions from your online Internet banking facility, then you can create a statement for any date range you wish. Normally you would use a six-month period, however one-, three- and twelve-month periods are also common.
4. Transactions - Transactions are used to track changes to the balance of an account. For each change to the balance you create one transaction. For example, if your statement has ten transactions then you would create ten transactions in Home Loan Interest Manager Pro. You have the option of typing in your transactions, or using the import wizard to load them automatically (refer to Importing Transactions below).
   
   Note: Before you can add transactions to an account, you must add at least one statement to put them in.

Transaction Categories

To help you get the most out of the loan information you enter into Home Loan Interest Manager Pro, you can allocate categories to your transactions (for example, a transaction may be a FEE, or an INTEREST charge, or a DEPOSIT, etc).

There are four main summary categories shipped with Home Loan Interest Manager Pro:

1. INTEREST - A special category used to indicate that a transaction is an interest charge and that it should be audited.
2. FEE - Any transaction charge on the loan that isn't interest (for example, a late payment fee, an account maintenance fee).
3. DEPOSIT - Used to reflect money going into the loan (for example, a regular repayment, a one-off deposit).
4. WITHDRAWAL - Used to reflect money coming out of the loan (for example, a withdrawal from a line of credit)

Within each of these summary categories, you can set up an unlimited number of detailed categories that better reflect your transactions. A default set of categories is shipped with Home Loan Interest Manager Pro, however you may wish to edit, add or delete them to suit your needs.

Examples of categories include:

INTEREST - Periodic Interest
FEE - Late Payment Fee
FEE - Loan Maintenance Fee
DEPOSIT - Regular Repayment

Please note that the INTEREST parent category (and all the categories linked to it) is used by the Interest Checker Report to perform its calculations. Categories in this group should only be allocated to transactions that represent periodic interest charges.

Importing Transactions

To save you manually typing in all your transactions, Home Loan Interest Manager Pro provides you with an import wizard that allows you to load your transactions electronically.

Refer to Importing Transactions for more information.

Category Auto-Matching

To save you manually allocating categories to every transaction, Home Loan Interest Manager Pro provides you with a Category Auto-Matching tool.

This tool will automatically allocate categories to transactions by:

1. Examining categories you applied to transactions in previous statements.
2. Matching transactions to category wildcard patterns.

Refer to Category Auto-Matching for more information.

Workbooks

Home Loan Interest Manager Pro stores all your Account, Statement, Transaction, Interest Rate, Category and Parent Category information in a Workbook (with a file extension of .hlnn). You can create as many workbooks as you need.

Loan and Mortgage Reports Overview

Once you have entered your loan information into Home Loan Interest Manager Pro, you can start using the reports to help you AUDIT, SUMMARIZE and PLAN. The rest of this help topic looks at the summary view screen and some of the main reports available to you.

Loan and Mortgage Summary Screen

The loan summary view is the main screen for each account, and it provides you with a quick overview of your loan details.

The Latest Information section of the screen shows you the current balance, interest rate and remaining term of the loan. The Account Contents section provides you with a summary of how much information you have entered into Home Loan Interest Manager Pro for each account (the number of statements, transactions and interest rate changes).

The Summary Payout Plan section shows you the thousands you can save by paying off your home loan or mortgage earlier, along with the repayment adjustment required to meet your target. You simply set a target you are comfortable with and Home Loan Interest Manager Pro keeps the figures up to date each time you enter new loan information.

The Report Launcher section provides a quick an easy way to run any of the reports for the current loan or mortgage being displayed.

Balance Checker Report

The first step in auditing your loan or mortgage is to check that the sum of the transactions on your statement matches the balance reported by the lender.

Once you have entered your loan account, statements and transactions the Balance Checker Report will automatically do this for you and quickly highlights any errors in the balances.

Refer to Balance Checker Report for more information.

Interest Checker Report

When you are satisfied that the balances are correct, and you have entered all of the interest rate changes for the loan, you can run the Interest Checker Report.

The interest checker report recalculates all the interest amounts for the loan, matches them to each interest transaction reported by the lender, and highlights any differences.

If you have an offset account linked to the loan, the interest calculations will automatically take into account the offset account balance. You can see a breakdown of the offset account benefit by selecting the Offset Account tab in the Interest Checker report.

Refer to Interest Checker Report for more information.

Note: The first time you run the audit reports you may need to refer to the Reconciliation Errors topic for help on fine-tunning the account settings.

Refund Calculator Report

When you find a bank or lender error, you need to calculate the refund amount you are due. If the error happened some time ago you will have been paying interest on the error, and the refund amount could be considerably more than just the original error amount.

The refund calculator report is designed to calculate the current day value each error on your home loan or mortgage, taking into account the time since the error took place, interest and compound interest paid, manual adjustments, interest rate changes and additional deposits and withdrawals.

Refer to Refund Calculator Report for more information.

Daily Interest Report

The daily interest report provides a day-by-day breakdown of the interest payable on a loan.

The report provides you with all the details you need to perform thorough audits on your loans and mortgages. It allows you to find the interest payable between any two dates, audit your lenders calculations when you find an error or request a refund, provide insight into you lenders calculations and allows you to load the results into other applications to perform detailed financial analysis.

Refer to Daily Interest Report for more information.

Increase Repayments Report

Want to find out how much interest your will save if you increase your repayments, or make a one-off deposit?

The increase repayments report designed to show you the savings you can make even with the smallest of changes to your repayment amounts. Simple enter a new repayment amount and the report does the rest.

You can also adjust the current loan balance, interest rate, balance date, and payment frequency, so you can compare original and target repayment amounts for a whole range of scenarios.

Refer to Increase Repayments Report for more information.

Detailed Payout Plan Report

The detailed payout plan report is designed to help you pay-off your mortgage sooner and show you how much interest you will save when you achieve your goal.

It allows you to adjust the current loan balance, interest rate, balance date, payment frequency as well as the loan term, so you can compare original and target loan terms for a whole range of scenarios.

If you are looking to save thousands in interest payments, then this report is the place to start.

Refer to Payout Plan Report for more information.

Interest Rate Rise Report

Worried about interest rate rises and the impact they will have on your mortgage repayments?

The interest rate rise report allows you to enter a new interest rate for a loan or mortgage, allowing you to see how much better or worse off you will be when interest rates change, and the impact it will have on your loan repayments.

Refer to Interest Rate Rise Report for more information.