Guide
Debts, loans, and receivables
Track money you owe and money owed to you as accounts — loans, mortgages, payables, and receivables — grouped into the liabilities side of your balance sheet.
Bluecoins treats a debt as an account. Anything you owe — a personal loan, a mortgage, unpaid bills — can be a normal account with a balance that goes down as you pay it, and anything owed to you can be tracked the same way. Because debts are accounts, they get the full account toolkit: transactions, running balances, reports, and reminders.
Account types for debts
When you set up an account you pick its type, and the available types include the debt-oriented ones:
- Loans — personal or bank loans.
- Mortgages — property loans.
- Payables — money you owe to others.
- Receivables — money owed to you.
- Other liabilities — anything else you owe.
- Unbilled liabilities — debt that has not been billed yet (for example, the unbilled portion of a credit-card cycle).
Each account type belongs to an account group, and the groups drive where the account appears in your financial statements.
Where debts appear in your statements
Account groups split into Assets (what you own) and Liabilities (what you owe), and the balance sheet is built from that split. A loan account lands on the liabilities side automatically, and your net worth is assets minus liabilities — so tracking your debts in Bluecoins directly makes your net worth honest. See the balance sheet guide for how the report is built.
Tracking a loan day to day
The mechanics are the same as any other account:
- Create the account with a loan (or mortgage, payables) type and its starting balance — the amount you currently owe.
- Record each payment as a transaction against the account. The account’s running balance shows how much is left; as you pay, the balance shrinks.
- Set a reminder for recurring payments (monthly installments, for example) so you never miss one. See the reminders guide.
- Watch it in reports — the account appears in the accounts list, the balance sheet, and the net-worth report like any other account.
What Bluecoins does not do
Bluecoins tracks the balance of a debt — what is owed at any moment, built from the transactions you record. It does not calculate interest or amortization schedules for you: the starting balance, the payments, and any interest charges are all entered as transactions, and the balance is the arithmetic result. If your lender charges interest, record it as a transaction and the balance stays accurate.
Related
- Balance sheet and net worth — where liabilities sit in your statements.
- Credit cards — the other major kind of liability, with its own statement-cycle tools.
- Transactions — how payments into and out of a debt account are recorded.