Monday, November 6, 2017

An interesting phone call...

I was talking with a customer in early November of 2017, and our conversation really illuminated the difference between Moneylender 2 and Moneylender 3.  They're using both versions side-by-side until 2018 starts and they'll just work in Moneylender 3 after that.

Customer: "I have a borrower that was way behind.  They just sold their business or something and they paid the loan.  How do I enter that?"

Josh: "OK, did they pay it off completely?"

Customer: "No, they paid to bring it current.  They haven't paid since May of 2016."

Josh: "OK, in Moneylender 2 we need to put in $0 payments for all the due dates that were skipped.  We can use the Auto-Generate Payment History tool to create them in one shot."

Customer: "OK, tell me what to do."

We attempt to use the auto-generate tool to add about eighteen $0 payments to the loan to satisfy all the due dates up through September of 2017.

Josh: "Oh, and we have to go into each of these payments and move the Date Received past the grace period from the Date Applied so you collect the late fees that are owed."

Customer: "It's showing that there's $900 due now…  All these payments are for the regular payment amount, not zero."

We discover that we missed a radio button option in the auto-generate tool and have to delete the payment records we created to go back and set it up with $0 for the amounts.

Customer: "OK, so how do I set it up in Moneylender 3?"

Josh: "Just enter the amount and date for the payment."

Customer: "That's it?"

Josh: "Yep."

Customer: "OK, I'm just going to do that then."

It was conversations like these in the mid 2000's when I first saw the need for a reimagined loan calculation engine.  As Moneylender's use grew, I eventually stopped hearing about new loan types.  Confident that I understood the breadth of the task at hand, I designed a loan calculation system that could handle all the situations that would be thrown at it, while fully automating the determination of all the different dates and amounts that might ever be needed.