How to account for Euro/Sterling fluctuations

[landlordvision]

I have a problem with the entry for repayment of a loan.

We borrowed euro, and converted to sterling. The amount borrowed was subject to interest at 1% per month.

We repaid the loan plus interest, but because of the exchange rate volatility, the amount repaid was less than the amount borrowed.

How do I enter this?

[david]

Please use the following process to record gain on Revaluation of Exchange Rates:

1. Go to Finance Manager/Mortgages and Loans, click on the finance provider of the loan, go to Payments, click on Add Payment.

2. On the Add Payment form, choose Payment Type = Extra Payment, for a date choose the same date when the last loan payment was made and enter the Outstanding Loan Amount into the Capital Amount field. Click 'Save'.

3. Go to Settings/Chart of Accounts/Add Account and create an 'Expense' account called 'Revaluation of Exchange Rate'. If you are not required to include gain on exchange rate into the income tax report, untick the 'Include in landlord's income tax report' check box.

4. Go to Account Manager/Journal/Add Journal and post a journal transaction as below:

Debit Bank Account {Revaluation Amount}
Credit Revaluation of Exchange Rate {Gain on Revaluation = Revaluation Amount}

5. Finally, because you will end up with two extra bank transactions (a Debit and a Credit) which will not exist in the bank statement, you will have to do an ad-hoc reconciliation. To do so, go to Account Manager/Bank Accounts, click on your bank account and on the 'Account Transactions' tab hover the mouse pointer over the extra Credit and extra Debit transactions, and choose 'Ad-hoc Reconciliation' from the cog menu.

[nick]

We are working on these changes. However, we have decided to make a few additional related enhancements as below:

1. Payment Schedule - allow to load the payment schedule by property and room.
2. Tenant Payments - find a tenant by property and room.

Both changes above will help the landlords with larger portfolios to record the payments received by property and room as it's easier than remembering the name of each tenant.

Also, many of the reports in Landlord Vision will be affected by this change because of the required changes to the underlying database structure. We used to extract the rooms from the tenancies and now we'll have to retrieve the rooms from the tenants.

We don't have a firm date for these changes yet but at the moment the most likely release date is 9th November. We will let you know as soon as these changes are available.

In the meantime, you can still put your tenants on a joint tenancy and create an individual payment schedule for each tenant. The only constraint at the moment is that you can't assign a room to each tenant. If you have already created any habitable rooms, just temporarily remove the 'Is room habitable' flag as otherwise the software will force you to assign a room to the whole tenancy. As soon as we are done with the changes you will set the 'Is room habitable' flag again and you will be able to go to the joint tenancy and assign a room to each tenant as appropriate.

[nick]

Just wanted to let you know that the feature to assign tenants to rooms is now available in Landlord Vision. You can assign each tenant on a joint tenancy to one or even multiple rooms. As agreed, each joint tenancy is counted as one tenancy regardless of the number of tenants on the same tenancy.

Please also note the following changes which might be of interest:

1. If a primary tenant has not been assigned to any rooms then the software assumes that the primary tenant is assigned to all the rooms (this is important for the room occupancy reports).
2. If a secondary tenant is not assigned to a room then it is considered that the secondary tenant is assigned to any of the rooms assigned to other tenants on the same tenancy.
3. It is possible to search for a tenant by property and room in Payment Schedule - please go to Tenant Manager/Payment Schedule/Property, choose a property, click on the 'Tenant' drop-down box and you will find the room name underneath each tenant's name (if a room has been assigned to the tenant). You can also enter the room name in the 'Tenant' box and it will automatically filter the list. The 'Properties with active tenancies' check box could be used to show only properties with current tenancies.
4. It is easy to filter the tenant payments by property and room - go to Tenant Manager/Payments/Tenant to Landlord, click on 'Payer', enter the property name to filter the list of tenants and then choose a tenant based on the assigned room visible underneath the tenant's name.
5. Similarly, it is easy to enter payments by property and room - on the 'Add Payment' screen the 'Payer' drop-down box shows the property and room, if any, associated with each tenant.
6. All sections and reports in Landlord Vision have been reviewed and amended as necessary to take into account the ability to have primary and secondary tenants assigned to one or multiple rooms.