I am struggling to figure out the best way to record the transaction around mortgage payments. Here is a common setup.
Bank A checking account where rent is collected, and mortgage payments are made to Bank B
Mortgage account from Bank B(also synced to Stessa) which downloaded P+I and escrow transactions.
So every month, I get a transaction, let’s say $1500, as a mortgage payment in Bank A. Then I get a mortgage account in Bank B transaction downloaded saying something like $600 interest, $400 principal, and $500 -escrow. Then twice a year, I also get transactions that property tax was made or insurance from Bank B.
If I don’t make any changes in Stessa, those show up as if I paid a $3000 mortgage a month. How do you clean it up? Do you merge the transaction? do you mark one coming out of Bank A as “transfer”? Do you just delete it?
I have just been deleting the transaction from the checking account when you have a linked mortgage account (to avoid the duplication). In the case that you do not have a linked mortgage account (or it’s broken like Fay Servicing…) I split the transaction from the checking account into the applicable categories. I am curious to see how others are handling this, or what Stessa would suggest. I cringe every time I delete a transaction from Stessa…
It’s really not that big if a deal. Ultimately I would want to be the one to determine duplicate transactions, not a Stessa algorithm. The pros definitely out weigh the cons here.
The bigger issue I’m facing is that there are several mortgage servicers that are not linking or have broken links with Stessa - which is unfortunate. That makes for much more manual effort…
I agree with @kilativ, I have the same issue he’s brought up and would like Stessa to comment and/or provide some feedback on this. We have 5 mortgages and so handling this for each one, based on either solution, isn’t a great resolution.
It seems like Stessa should be able to link the two transactions (mortgage bank account to checking account) and determine that this mortgage payment from checking account is the mortgage interest & principal reported from the other institution. That’s the ideal solution in my mind.
Additionally, when a mortgage provider doesn’t allow ability to sync, it would be really nice for the mortgage payment from the checking account to be split into P+I+E which things like Quicken can setup and do for you.
I’m noticing this issue as well. If you record Bank A transaction’s as a $1,500 “Mortgage Payment” and then record Bank B’s Transaction in the separate categories, $600 interest, $400 principal and $500 escrow, it will double count in the net cash flow statement.
I think this is low hanging fruit that needs to be fixed…
I also disconnected the sync - it was just throwing off all he reports until I manually went in and deleted the transaction. Also considering there is no way to add opening balance for the year this data with the sync has little value.
