Disbursement and accounting

Every loan is, above all, money leaving your cash drawer. Prestafolio does not ask you to write that down separately: when you create the loan, the cash goes down and the books are written on their own, in the same operation. This article tells you exactly what gets recorded, so you can reconcile and defend your numbers.

Golden rule: all or nothing

Creating a loan does four things at once, and if one fails none of them happens:

1. The loan is stored.
2. An outgoing movement is recorded in the open cash shift.
3. The disbursement accounting entry is posted.
4. It is verified that the cash did not go negative.

If the resulting balance is not enough, the system undoes everything and returns "Cash balance is not enough to disburse this loan". There is no intermediate state of "loan created but cash out of balance".

The two preconditions

• An open cash shift. Without it, no money-moving operation runs. You get the closed-drawer warning with a shortcut to open it.
• Accounting active. The Cash (1101) account is the single source of truth for cash: it is what gets read to decide whether you have enough. Without the accounting module provisioned there is neither a balance nor overdraft protection, and the system prefers to fail loudly rather than disburse blindly.

The disbursement entry

You lend RD$10,000:

Read it like this: the money did not disappear, it changed places. It left your drawer and is now out on the street, in the portfolio. Your equity did not change by lending.

Interest is NOT recorded here. The projected profit exists as a figure on the loan, but in accounting terms it is not yours until you collect it. Income from interest (4101) and from arrears (4102) is recognized in the entry of each collection, not at disbursement. That is correct and it is what protects you from "profits" that never came in.

Adjusting a loan's amount

As long as the loan has no payments, you can change its principal. The cash is adjusted by the difference, not by the full amount:

• You raise it from RD$10,000 to RD$12,000 → another RD$2,000 leaves the drawer (DR Portfolio / CR Cash). If there is no balance for those RD$2,000, the edit is rejected.
• You lower it from RD$10,000 to RD$8,000 → RD$2,000 come back into the drawer (DR Cash / CR Portfolio). This never fails on funds: money comes in.
• If you leave the same amount, no entry is written.

Deleting a loan

Only a loan with no payments at all can be deleted, and never one already settled or renewed. When you delete it:

• The principal goes back into the cash drawer as a refund.
• All of that loan's entries are reversed: they are voided in the ledger, not erased.

This cannot be undone. The loan disappears from your portfolio. If it had payments, it is not even attempted: you get "Cannot delete a loan with payments recorded": deleting it would throw your cash out of balance.

Renewing

Renewing moves money twice, and therefore leaves two entries:

1. Reintegration: the old loan's outstanding principal comes back into the drawer (DR Cash / CR Portfolio).
2. Disbursement: the new loan's principal leaves the drawer, with an entry identical to any new loan's.

The net cash effect is the difference between the two. In practice this means that to renew you only need the difference in the drawer, not the new loan's full amount. The details are in Renewing a loan.

Marking as uncollectible (write-off)

Marking a loan uncollectible does not touch the cash: that money left long ago. What it does is recognize the loss: it removes the outstanding principal from the portfolio and charges it, first, against whatever allowance for doubtful loans (1290) you have built up, and the rest to Write-off Loss (5202).

An example with RD$6,000 outstanding and RD$2,500 of available allowance:

If you have no allowance built up, the whole loss goes to 5202. And if the loan is already settled, renewed, archived, or its outstanding principal is zero, nothing is posted: there is nothing real to write off.

A write-off is a terminal event. If you later flip the loan back to collectible, the flag changes but the write-off entry is not reversed. Think twice before writing off.

Accounting periods

Every entry falls inside the accounting period covering the event's date. If that month did not exist yet, the system creates it for you: you do not have to "open the month" by hand.

What does block you is an already closed period: nothing is posted inside a closed month. If you try to record an operation dated inside a closed period, the operation is rejected. That is the protection that makes a period close mean something.

How to reconcile your cash

At any moment this must hold:

Cash balance (1101) = the cash you opened with + everything you collected − everything you disbursed ± adjustments and refunds.

All those movements are recorded in the cash shift and in the ledger, with who did them and when. If your physical count does not match the system's balance, the gap is in a real movement, not in a rounding error: the system works in whole cents.