Introduction

Payments are integral to any lending operation, and understanding what payments have been scheduled can help you predict income. Forecast reports do just that—show you the payments that have been scheduled across all the loans in your tenant.

What are Forecast Reports?

Forecast reports are a category of tenant-level reports in LMS. This category comprises two specific reports: Forecasted Payments and Scheduled Payments. Both show information about payments that have been scheduled; the difference is the timing of those payments.

• The Forecasted Payments Report shows info about payments that are forecasted in the future.
• The Scheduled Payments Report shows info about payments that were scheduled in the past, whether they were successful or not. (If you only want to see successful payments, check out the Payments Breakdown report.)

Like all tenant-level reports, they can show you the data for all the loans in your tenant, or a more narrow set of loans that you select with search filters. Both, for example, can narrow your results to payments within a specific timeframe, or payments on loans with specific statuses.

Both of these tools are fairly rudimentary. The look at the payment schedule as it appears in each loan, and then compile that data in a single report. But they don't anticipate any potential changes to your loans. If 70% of your payments are made in a typical week, the system won't take that into account when generating a Forecasted Payments Report, and will instead show you how your income would look if 100% of payments were made in full. Neither can these reports predict an increase in income from new loans. Even if you routinely add new loans into your tenant, the system will only show you the forecasted reports at the time the report was generated.

Where do Forecast Reports Fit?

These reports may be helpful on their own, but they can also be more useful when contextualized against other reports.

For example, the Scheduled Payments Report shows you data for all the payments that were scheduled in a given period. You could also run a Payments Breakdown Report for the same time period, and compare their results against each other to see how much you should have earned (based on the loans' amortization schedule) and how much you actually brought in. Then, you could apply that ratio to a Forecasted Payments Report, which might yield a better prediction of how much you can expect to bring in during a similar window in the future.

Terminology

Here's a quick review of the relevant terms.

This Feature is Not

Let's take a minute to clear up any possible misunderstandings.

• The Scheduled Payments report is not the same as scheduling a report. Our article on scheduling reports explains how to set up a report that will run at some point in the future, or even at recurring intervals. The Scheduled Payments report is a specific report that shows which payments had been scheduled.
• Yes, we have a category of reports called 'Forecast Reports' and a specific one called 'Forecasted Payment Report', and that is admittedly a little confusing. But think of it like a family: Mr. Forecast Reports named his son Forecasted Payment Report, and then named the next son Scheduled Payments Report.

What's Next?

If you've read this far, you're probably ready to run these reports yourself. Our articles on the Scheduled Payments Report and Forecasted Payments Report show you where to navigate in the software, how to use search filters to narrow your data set, and what your results may look like.

You might also be interested in the Payments Breakdown Report, which shows reports that were actually made.