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AheadStay ahead of the month.

Money between people

A loan is not a spending category.

₹50,000 to your brother at 12% reducing. A two-wheeler loan at 11% flat. Neither of those is an expense, both are real obligations, and a budget that cannot tell the difference will get every figure downstream of them wrong.
11% flat is really
19.87%
A reducing rate, on ₹1,20,000 over two years — the rate your money feels.
Interest on it
₹26,400
Charged on the full ₹1,20,000 for both years, though you repay it every month.

How a loan is kept

Principal and interest are kept apart, because the budget treats them differently.

Money you lent
Principal returns
Repaid principal goes back to the envelope it came out of: the ₹50,000 you gave your brother left Savings, and it returns there. The interest is income, because it is money you did not have before.
Money you borrowed
Principal spends
Borrowed money is money you can assign, and what you owe rises by the same amount, so your net worth does not jump. Repaid principal leaves the budget, and the interest part is an ordinary expense.

Getting this wrong in the obvious way, by routing all of it through income, makes every repayment look like a payday. Then your reports congratulate you for being paid back money that was always yours.

The Ahead loans screen, showing one loan lent out and one borrowed, with totals for each and a net position.
Owed to you and owed by you, both stated positive: the direction carries the meaning. Net position is what you would be left holding if everything settled today.

The number nobody quotes

11% flat is not 11%.

A flat rate charges interest on the original amount for the whole term, including the part you have already paid back. A reducing rate charges only on what is still owed. The same quoted percentage costs close to twice as much when it is flat.

Ahead works out the real rate from the instalment you were quoted and shows it on the loan, before it draws the schedule.

₹1,20,000 over 2 years
Flat
Reducing
Quoted rate
11% flat
11% reducing
Monthly instalment
₹6,100
₹5,592.94
Total interest, 2 years
₹26,400
₹14,230.57
What it really costs
19.87% reducing
11% reducing
Same principal, same term, same quoted rate. ₹12,169.43 of difference: two months of instalments, for nothing.

One loan, read end to end

Every figure traces back to a row.

A loan’s page reads like a statement: what is still owed, how much has been repaid, then one entry per event. Each event opens to show the transactions it wrote, and each of those opens the account it sits in, so a figure you doubt can be followed down to the transaction that made it.

There is no delete. A correction is an adjustment or a write-off, and both leave a record.

A single loan's statement page, with the outstanding figure, a repaid meter, the monthly instalment and a timeline of two events.
₹50,000 lent at 12% reducing, one repayment recorded against it.

The other person

One agreement, two sets of books, neither one in charge.

If your brother uses Ahead too, link the loan and both households keep their own record of it, in step. A repayment he enters arrives with you as a claim and moves nothing until you confirm it. Sharing is off by default, chosen loan by loan, and either of you can stop without anything disappearing from the other side.

If he does not, send him the statement instead: a read-only link to that one loan, with a password and an expiry if you want them. He needs no account to open it.

Claims, disagreements and share links
Loan — Rahul

Your books

₹40,000

You logged three repayments.

Their books

₹35,000

They logged four.

₹5,000 apart. Ahead shows both figures and names the difference. It does not decide which of you is right — one of you has a repayment to record, and only the two of you know which.

Find out what your EMI is really costing you.

Record the terms once and the schedule, the outstanding balance and the effective rate follow.

Start free for 60 days
No card
Nothing starts charging when the trial ends.
Nothing to connect
No bank login, and nothing reads your SMS.
Export whenever
A zip of CSVs, paid or not.