Loan portfolio tracking for a microfinancing company

Question

I'm helping out a friend with his small start up. The gist of things is that we're a microfinancing company. We've got a lot of clients small clients and are having a not so great time keep track of people's payment records, computing penalties etc...

I've been looking around online for software that would make our lives easier, but all the stuff that shows up look to be on sketchy-ish sites or things that just don't sit well with me. (ex: LoanAssistant, Loandisk) some red flags are that the copyright years are 2+yrs old on the site.

Right now we're doing everything in excel and as you can guess, there's a lot of potential for errors etc.. so we have to have two sets of people running the ledgers.

Any suggestions?

Edit to answer questions in comments:

Z Z - Preferably local hosting because the founder is a little leery when it comes to cloud based solutions. However if the cloud solution is clearly superior, I'll do my best to make a case for it.

Nicolas Raoul - Ideally we'd like to have all the account ledgers (amounts paid, broken into principal, interest and penalties, remaining balance, time to maturity, etc...) then have it flow into a sort of general ledger (phrasing? I'm not an accountant) to monitor inflows & outflows that can be used by our accounting staff as well.

Izzy - We're a windows shop, windows 7 or 10. As for budget, it's kind of hard to say. Since I've never really used any software in this space, I'm not sure how much you can do with the product. As a small company, a big software budget might be prohibitive but as with all things, it really depends if/how much of a game changer it is.

Answer 1

Firstly, I recommend you try out Mifos. It is an open source Web-based [Java, JSP, Mysql] system that can be self-hosted. You can download it on sourceforge. You can also try out a demo here. This will work for any Windows or Linux platform. Mifos has:

• Client Management e.g.details, identity mgt, documents, family members etc.

• Loans & Savings Portfolio Tracking: set up loans, savings, fixed deposits, etc. and track to client payments, etc.

• Accounting Support – chart of accounts, ledgers, balance sheet etc

• Reporting for Clients, Loans, Savings, Accounting, etc.

You can also search its forums on sourceforge and the main site, if you have any specific questions not addressed. I have installed and explored a local copy on a previous project.

Secondly, there are other solutions on sourceforge which you can see via a search. I have not tried the others, as Mifos was the most promising at the time.

Thirdly, there are a few newer cloud-based start-ups like Mambu etc. I am aware of some companies using them. But you will have to find out their pricing, etc.

Answer 2

If a lot of features are not needed, then most any stock portfolio software can work because loan money going-out is like buying a security since that transaction has money going-out and loan money coming-in is like selling a security since that transaction has money coming-in. Then interest payments received from a loan are like dividends received.

The number of shares could be the number of dollars of the loan or even the number of pennies of the loan. Then loan principal received would be a number of shares sold.

"KBH Investor Accounting" is a shareware stock portfolio software that accounts a mark-to-market profit/loss accounting. And because of that profit/loss feature it can actually be used for business books. For instance, in addition to Deposit, Withdrawal, and Dividend, it also has Expense. It does furthermore account short positions if needed. Also, dividends can be noted to the security that they are received from.