amortaQuickBooks Online has no loan manager. What to use instead
QuickBooks Online has no loan manager and no amortization schedule. For every client loan, someone has to split each payment into principal and interest by hand and work out the current portion separately. Here's what firms do about it, and what actually keeps the books right.
Amortization in QuickBooks Online "will have to be done through manual transactions, such as checks and journal entries."Intuit, "Does QuickBooks Online have an amortization schedule?"
QuickBooks Online holds the loan as a liability account and records whatever you post to it. It won't calculate the schedule, split the payments, or tell you what's due in the next 12 months.
The usual workarounds
- A spreadsheet and manual splits. An Excel schedule per loan, and each month someone enters the payment's principal and interest. Accurate if it's kept up, but it breaks when the note is actual/360 and the sheet assumes 30/360, a payment lands late, or the rate changes. It lives on one person's desktop.
- Bank rules or recurring entries. They repeat a fixed split, but the interest part falls every month as the balance goes down (and changes with the days on actual/360 loans). The split is wrong every month and the balance drifts from the lender's statement.
- Post the whole payment to the loan, fix it at year-end. Quick, but debt is understated and interest expense is missing from every monthly P&L until the year-end entry.
- An app that keeps the schedule and posts the entries. Each loan's terms in one place, the schedule calculated to the cent, and the entries posted into the client's QuickBooks Online company. That's what Amorta does.
| Approach | Payment split right each month | Current portion | Year-end roll-forward and maturities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet + manual splits | Yes, if kept up | Separate calculation | Built by hand |
| Bank rule or recurring entry | No | No | No |
| Fix at year-end | No | No | Built by hand |
| Amorta | Yes, posted for you | Yes, every month | Yes, PDF and Excel |
How Amorta handles it
The 2-minute introduction.
- Connect the client's QuickBooks Online and pick the accounts once.
- Add each loan from the promissory note. Amorta builds the schedule.
- Each month, review and post the payment split, accrued interest and current-portion true-up in one click. If the lender's statement differs, enter what the bank applied.
- At year-end, download the debt roll-forward and maturities as PDF or Excel.
$4 per active loan a month ($20 minimum), 30-day free trial, no card needed. Want to see the numbers first? Try the free loan amortization calculator.
Recording a loan payment by hand
- + New → Check or Expense (or split the bank feed transaction), payee: the lender.
- Line 1: the loan's liability account, the principal. Line 2: Interest Expense, the interest. Together they equal the payment.
- At each reporting date, move the principal due in the next 12 months to a current liability account ("Current Portion of Long-Term Debt") with a journal entry.
Questions
Does QuickBooks Online have a Loan Manager?
No. QuickBooks Online has no built-in loan manager or amortization schedule. Intuit's help article says amortization has to be done with manual transactions such as checks and journal entries.
Can I use a bank rule to split loan payments?
Only roughly. Rules split by a fixed percentage or amount, but the interest part of an amortizing loan changes every month, so the balance drifts from the lender's statement.
Does Amorta work with lines of credit or variable-rate loans?
Not yet. It handles fixed-rate term loans, mortgages, equipment and vehicle loans, SBA loans and balloon notes, including rate changes the bank notifies.
Try it on one of your clients' loans
Connect a client, add one loan from the note, and see the month's entries before anything is posted.