unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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How to do things in Money: Mortgages and stuff

Q) I just made an extra principal payment to a loan. Why can't I just use Transfer to show this in Money?

A) It seems like many versions ago you could. Then we could use just a Principal Transfer. Somewhere along the way even this became too simple. The way to do it now is to use the Special Category named 'Loan Payment'. Money (at least recent versions) will then ask if you want to include both principal and interest. You have to say yes, even if that's not what you want to do. The next panel will ask you to pick a loan or enter a new loan account name. Pick the name of the loan you want to transfer principal to. Then you can go into the split where you will find a Principal Transfer, an interest expense item and possibly other items depending on how you defined your loan payment; you can delete every element but the Principal Transfer. Note that Money may be a little testy about changing your amount to the appropriate amount for the next regular payment, your memo to the account number, and your payee to the pre-defined payee. You can fix all of this to the way you want it if you are persistent. You can add or change other elements of the payment for things like service charges or whatever. But if you need to do this, now's the time to do so as noted next.

If you reduce the Loan Payment to just the one Principal Transfer element, when you enter it in the register, it will be displayed in the future as just a Principal Transfer and it cannot be split back into a Loan Payment. Seems like a long way to go to get to the Principal Transfer you wanted when you started.

Thanks to Chris Cowles for recommending this Q/A and providing a draft.

Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.

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