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Post by Ton ⓉⓞⓃ on Nov 28, 2014 20:57:25 GMT
I would have thought that a non-accountant with a MLIA set to withdraw repayments would be very confused by a MLIA balance that kept dropping without their MLIA statement showing any transactions at all. Either these are separate accounts, or they're not. If they are, each statement should stand on its own as a record of that account's activities. If they're not, then AC shouldn't be providing separate statements, and all activity should be shown on a single statement with each item identified as to which 'account' it relates to. The trouble seems to me that "the MLIA" is really two accounts - "MLIA Awaiting Investment" (the uninvested cash) and "MLIA Currently Invested" (the actual loans). At present, a statement can only be generated for the former. Are you referring to the fact that you put money into the CA and the value (in the form of a Loan) then appeas in the MLIA for shadow bids? I.e. that the money sits in the MLIA segregated but invisible until the loan is drawn?
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sl75
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Post by sl75 on Nov 28, 2014 21:53:18 GMT
The trouble seems to me that "the MLIA" is really two accounts - "MLIA Awaiting Investment" (the uninvested cash) and "MLIA Currently Invested" (the actual loans). At present, a statement can only be generated for the former. I don't get that and you may be missing the issue if you don't have a GEIA and you don't have the MLIA and GEIA accounts set to Withdraw. e.g.: Legacy loan advance/purchase: appears as a DEBIT from the "cash" account and a CREDIT on the "MLIA currently invested" account. New loan purchase (there are no new loan advances any more) appears as a DEBIT from the "MLIA awaiting investment" account, and a CREDIT on the "MLIA currently invested" account. Loan repayment (without withdrawing repayments) appears as a DEBIT from the "MLIA currently invested" account and a CREDIT on the "MLIA awaiting investment" account. Loan repayment (withdrawing repayments, or pre-dating the new site) appears as a DEBIT from the "MLIA currently invested" account and a CREDIT on the "cash" account. ... so for all MLIA investment activity, you would observe the MLIA currently invested statement (not currently available!), whereas the current MLIA statement (for the "awaiting investment") balance shows only movements of cash to/from THAT balance.
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Post by batchoy on Nov 29, 2014 6:20:50 GMT
I don't get that and you may be missing the issue if you don't have a GEIA and you don't have the MLIA and GEIA accounts set to Withdraw. e.g.: Legacy loan advance/purchase: appears as a DEBIT from the "cash" account and a CREDIT on the "MLIA currently invested" account. New loan purchase (there are no new loan advances any more) appears as a DEBIT from the "MLIA awaiting investment" account, and a CREDIT on the "MLIA currently invested" account. Loan repayment (without withdrawing repayments) appears as a DEBIT from the "MLIA currently invested" account and a CREDIT on the "MLIA awaiting investment" account. Loan repayment (withdrawing repayments, or pre-dating the new site) appears as a DEBIT from the "MLIA currently invested" account and a CREDIT on the "cash" account. ... so for all MLIA investment activity, you would observe the MLIA currently invested statement (not currently available!), whereas the current MLIA statement (for the "awaiting investment") balance shows only movements of cash to/from THAT balance. Adding a third(fifth) account/statment is an unnecessary complication, the MLIA/GEIA are a single account(s) that hold(s) investments and cash there is no need to split the the MLIA/GEIA down further. There is no issue with accounting for them as such in any reasonable accounting package including an excel spreadsheet that can handle investments. The problem at the moment is that with the MILA and GEIA set to withdraw is: Transfer of money to AC CREDIT on the CA statement, DEBIT on my bank Current Account Statement Transfer of funds to MILA/GEIA DEBIT on the CA statement and Credit on MILA/GEIA statement Purchase of Loan Parts PURCHASE of Loan on the MLIA/GEIA statement Repayment of interest/capital REPAYMENT of interest/capital on the CA statement with no reference to the source account so you don't know if the payment was from a loan holding in the MLIA or the GEIA. Nothing on the MLIA/GEIA statement. Sale of Loan Parts SALE of loan part on the CA statement with no reference to the source account though it is possible, with a lot of forensic investigation, to match the Loan IDs and thus work out if the loan part was held in the MLIA or the GEIA. Nothing on the MLIA/GEIA Thus without a serious amounts of data manipulation and forensic accounting particularly with the shrapnelator turning a £100 loan purchase into over 100 individual loan purchases each one having it own identity and then when you sell it off as a £90 loan turning it again into over 100 individual loan sales again with each sale having its own id, it is nigh impossible to do anything meaningful with the statements and impossible to do a reconciliation import into an accounting package.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Nov 29, 2014 17:18:32 GMT
The problem at the moment is ... ... well described. Do we even have an acknowledgement from andrewholgate or anyone else in AC that the accounting practice being used is not industry standard and could use improving?
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Post by batchoy on Nov 29, 2014 19:26:16 GMT
The problem at the moment is ... ... well described. Do we even have an acknowledgement from andrewholgate or anyone else in AC that the accounting practice being used is not industry standard and could use improving? As far as I can see I first raised the issue on the 22 nd Oct, I remember that because it was my birthday, and SWMBO wanted to know why I was swearing at the computer: www.p2pindependentforum.com/post/25770. chris engaged in various subsequent posts but his comments were to the effect as to deny that there was a problem but if people said it was he might add it to 'the list' then on the 17 th Nov chris may have acknowledged the issue was on the list and being worked on: www.p2pindependentforum.com/post/29399. andrewholgate and stuartassetzcapital were made directly aware of the issue in a formal complaint on the 4 th Nov, whilst the complaint has been acknowledged as yet it has not been responded to. It is my personal view that whilst there may be 5 ex-lenders in situ on the board ( www.p2pindependentforum.com/post/30565) not one of them has used or is using the platform in earnest as a lender and thus has no experience of the issues that we (their customers) are seeing on a daily and ongoing basis, as this is the only reasonable explanation for the continuing issues lenders have with core functionality of the platform and some of the responses we are getting from AC staff which appear disconnected from the actual issues being reported. What AC and a number of posters to this forum seem to forget is that we are customers of an FCA regulated financial institution that handles our money we are not unpaid alpha testers of AC's software platform. We would not accept these issues from the mainstream banks so there is no reason why we should from alternate finance companies.
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Post by Jack Barlow on Nov 29, 2014 19:49:13 GMT
batchoychris added a "like" to this post p2pindependentforum.com/post/25929/thread in which I was supporting the need for each account to have fully reconcilable transactions. I took this thumbs up to mean that he/AC accepted that this would need to be implemented. So, like you, I'm hoping it's on his to-do list.
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bigfoot12
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Post by bigfoot12 on Nov 29, 2014 20:29:33 GMT
We would not accept these issues from the mainstream banks so there is no reason why we should from alternate finance companies. The problem that I see is that in the 10+ years I have been using online banking change has been very slow. Problems and shortcomings I have been complaining (not formally) about for most of those years are still there. I have tried other banks but at the moment not one of them gives me what I want. I don't expect that to change in the next few years. Maybe Virgin or TSB or someone else will introduce some innovation but I doubt it. There are problems with the new site. They need to fix some of them soon. They need to fix others in time. In some cases they need to allow options so that we can chose how things work, but that will add complexity; if Google built the new site there would be virtually no choices. I quite like the accounting, all of my sales are in one download and all of my purchases are in another which suits me well, but I accept that it needs to be improved. I am happy to give AC another couple of months to get the minor flaws fixed. Temporary missteps are an acceptable price of innovation, but they do need to be fixed.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Nov 29, 2014 23:41:31 GMT
Temporary missteps are an acceptable price of innovation, but they do need to be fixed. And the first step in the fixing progress is an acknowledgement that there is a problem that need fixing.
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sl75
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Post by sl75 on Nov 30, 2014 20:34:33 GMT
Repayment of interest/capital REPAYMENT of interest/capital on the CA statement with no reference to the source account so you don't know if the payment was from a loan holding in the MLIA or the GEIA. Nothing on the MLIA/GEIA statement. The MLIA / GEIA statements we currently have are showing cash transactions on the MLIA / GEIA. In instances such as this, wehre there are no cash transaction for the MLIA / GEIA in this instance, nothing belongs on that statement. Yes, it should indicate the source account for the transaction... An alternative mechanism, of course, would be to bounce the repayments into the MLIA / GEIA, and then have a separate transaction to transfer it back to the cash account... but why? It's extra transactions for no purpose other than to keep statements "tidy" for people who have a particular way of wanting to operate their accounts. The "Awaiting investment" and the "Currently invested" are in fact different accounts [or to drill down further, "Currently invested" is the aggregate total of several different loan accounts]. There seems to me absolutely no problem with a transaction directly between one of the loan accounts and the cash account, as long as it is identified where the money came from - either by including details of which account the money "came from" on the cash statement, or by allowing a full statement to be generated or downloaded for the loan account [again, either by aggregating them all into a single "MLIA currently invested" account as per the simplified suggestion in my previous post, or even going to the extent of allowing a statement to be generated for each individual loan account]. A loan unit I bought with cash from my MLIA is no more "in" my MLIA than my shopping I bought with credit from my credit card account is "in" my credit card account.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Nov 30, 2014 23:06:53 GMT
The MLIA / GEIA statements we currently have are showing cash transactions on the MLIA / GEIA. In instances such as this, wehre there are no cash transaction for the MLIA / GEIA in this instance, nothing belongs on that statement. I think part of the problem is that the way things are the MLIA/GEIA statements do not present a complete picture. If there's a capital repayment that goes straight into the cash account then the MLIA/GEIA has sustained a drop in the assets contained in it without there being any evidence of activity in the account. That strikes me as the wrong approach. So I'd like to see the statement entries showing the repayments in the relevant accounts and the subsequent transfer out of the cash into the Cash Account, even though it does seem to create extra statement entries. As an alternative, there could be just a single combined statement for a lender's AC account that shows all activity, with every entry identified as to which sub-account generated the transaction. I think that would eliminate the need to create two statement entries every time a bit of cash is moved between the Cash Account and one of the other accounts.
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sl75
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Post by sl75 on Dec 1, 2014 10:35:09 GMT
If there's a capital repayment that goes straight into the cash account then the MLIA/GEIA has sustained a drop in the assets contained in it without there being any evidence of activity in the account. That strikes me as the wrong approach. So I'd like to see the statement entries showing the repayments in the relevant accounts and the subsequent transfer out of the cash into the Cash Account, even though it does seem to create extra statement entries. There seems to me already quite enough clutter on the statement (in my case that is in part because I keep fiddling with the settings of targets for different loans). For someone who would rather use each investment account only for MAKING investments, the current form of statements for the investment accounts could be ideal - they'd have a statement showing money in when they allocate cash for further investment, and money out when they make investments, giving a clear view of when investments were made, without all the extra clutter from repayments. Some mechanism for indicating which account's investment the repayment came from would of course be beneficial, but artificially re-routing the repayment through the investment account could be counter-productive for use cases where there are many investment accounts, and the user is more interested in tracking exactly what was invested in and when, rather than tracking hundreds of tiny repayments. For me, I don't conceptually consider the cash and the assets to be "in the same account" (although of course they could be considered sub-accounts of the same "parent" account). When a loan is made, the money goes out from the MLIA. It goes TO something else (which must therefore NOT be the MLIA, or at least not the same sub-account within the MLIA), and it is that (or a filtered down version of that) for which we need a statement in order to have a view of activity on a particular loan or group of loans. I don't see that the MLIA cash statement needs extra statement entries just to make up for the absence of a way to generate a statement for the loan account. For myself personally, I'm presently re-investing repayments - I've already got my targets set up as I wish within the MLIA, and it can and should use whatever money becomes available to work towards whatever target allows for further investment, but it seems quite possible when the bespoke accounts launch that I may have repayments withdrawn and re-invested via one or more bespoke accounts... in which case an investment statement may become more interesting than a repayment statement. Hmmm... one other feature than I now notice as missing (although not entirely related to the above)... When using the "adjust investment" to attempt to take more cash that is present in the MLIA / GEIA, the system sets a "withdrawal target", and makes further withdrawals as and when funds become available. However, when using it to attempt to take more cash than is present in the "cash account", the system simply blocks it. Instead, it should ideally be setting an "investment target" so that it can take funds from the cash account as and when funds become available. In particular, as and when the bespoke accounts are launched, I would anticipate setting up one or more of these, and having any repayments from the MLIA / GEIA withdrawn, in order to allow re-investment via a bespoke account. It would be good to be able to give an investment target for the bespoke account, and allow the system to look after itself until that target is met or I revise the instructions.
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