How To Track Your Investments In P2P Lending

In this article, you’ll find out exactly how I keep track of all of my P2P investment accounts and how I calculate my returns from peer to peer lending every month, with the help of a free tool called Portfolio Performance.

You’re going to learn how you can easily track the performance of your investments and see the actual internal rate of return on your money.

Why you should do your own IRR calculations

You shouldn’t rely on the return percentages you see when logging in to your P2P platform accounts, as those can differ quite a bit from your own calculations. One reason for that is that they don’t take potential cash drag into account, meaning money that is sitting in your account waiting to be invested.

But if you’re anything like me, chances are you want to know the actual returns you’re getting on your investment, to identify the peer to peer lending platforms that are really worth your time and money in the long run.

Portfolio Performance: What I’ve been using to track my P2P investments for over a year

To do just that, I’ve been using a free, open-source software called Portfolio Performance. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s completely free from ads and doesn’t require a registration. In short, it’s a fantastic tool.

I’m very grateful to the German developer who has been doing all of this for free and who keeps updating it on a regular basis. I’m sure a lot of people, me included, would be happy to send him a small donation to support his work if he ever adds a Donate button to his website.

Download the Software here:

• Portfolio Performance
  Note: The website is in German, but the software itself is in English once you download it. Otherwise, feel free to use the Google-translated link below.
• Portfolio Performance (Google translated to English)

Tracking your P2P Portfolio with Portfolio Performance

Once you’re done downloading and installing Portfolio Performance, here is what you need to do to set it up.

Setting up Portfolio Performance

Create a new file, choose the base currency (Euro in our case), add a securities account (doesn’t matter in our case – we can delete it after) and a reference account (here you can add the first P2P platform you’d like to track) and click Add.

Tap Finish. Now you can delete the securities account again if you wish, as we won’t be needing it for our calculations, which are focused around p2p lending in this article.

Add all the P2P platforms that you’d like to track using Portfolio Performance under Deposit Accounts by clicking on the + sign in the top right.

Once the accounts are all there, start adding your deposits to each platform, using the correct dates. Select the platform, right click the Transactions window below and click on Deposit…

To get all the correct dates of your deposits, either check the platforms themselves or search for each platform in your e-mails. Most of them (all?) send you an e-mail as soon as they receive new funds from you.

Now, add all the deposits you made to the P2P platform one by one, using the respective date when it arrived on the platform. If you’re adding more than one, you can cut some time by clicking Save & New instead of Save.

How To Add Your Monthly P2P Income (Interest)

I recommend spending a couple of minutes every month on the same date (eg. on the 1st) to add all interest payments you received last month. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this is by comparing your current balance on a platform to the month before and adding the difference as interest.

This shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes of your time.

If you have very little time that day, you can also quickly login to your accounts, take a screenshot and add the numbers later. It’s up to you if you count bonus payments and cashback you receive as interest income or not, I personally add it to my calculations (if it’s available to all investors).

To add interest, right click the Transactions window again and choose Interest…

I’ll give you examples for how to import existing data from a couple of popular crowdlending platforms below. After the initial setup, you’ll be able to save some time by simply adding the account balance difference as interest on a month-by-month basis in the future.

Adding Mintos to Portfolio Performance

Let’s start with Mintos. Click on Account Statement and choose a full month. As I import my data on the 1st, I like to count from the 2nd of the previous month until the 1st of the current month. You can use different dates if you like, just stay consistent.

Tap Search. Then, add up interest received, late fees received, interest income on rebuy and potential bonus payments and add those to Portfolio Performance as interest (we would use Feb. 1st as date in this case).

By clicking on Deposits, you’ll be able to see the exact dates of your deposits, which you can then add to Portfolio Performance as well if you haven’t already.

Adding Envestio to Portfolio Performance

On Envestio, click on Statistics,  enter the dates and click on Download document to get an income statement for each month.

Adding Iuvo Group to Portfolio Performance

On Iuvo Group, click on Account Statement, enter the month and click Filter. Add up Late fees received, Interest received, Early interest repayment and potential Refer-a-friend Bonuses and add them as interest to your Iuvo Group account in Portfolio Performance.

Just like on Mintos, you’ll be able to see the exact dates and amounts of your contributions under Deposits.

To import your investments from Grupeer, click on Overview – Income statement and then download an income statement for each month.

Add up Interest income and Other income (bonuses) and add it as interest for the month. As far as deposits and withdrawals are concerned, doing a search within your e-mails is probably the fastest way.

Calculating the Internal Rate of Return of your P2P Investments

After you finished adding the data from all of your P2P platforms, you probably want to know your actual internal rate of return (IRR) for each platform.

Click on Performance, and in the top right corner, press the + sign next to Dashboard. Enter P2P Portfolio or another name in the New view window that pops up.

Next, right click and delete every single label until you have a blank page. Now, we can finally add our platform widgets. To do that, right click a column and select New Widget – Common – Heading.

In this example, I added three more columns. We now have one for each platform and one for our entire P2P Portfolio.

Note: If you’re invested on more than five platforms, add them below the first five, as adding more columns could make it look too cluttered.

To display your IRR so far, do this for each P2P platform:

1. Right click the space below the name, select New Widget – Performance – Internal Rate of Return (IRR).

2. To make sure the correct platform is being displayed, right click the widget, choose Select data series and select the platform.

3. With one last right click, make sure that the Reporting period starts on the day of your first deposit to the platform and ends on the last day when you updated all the numbers (eg. on the 1st of the month).

My Returns from P2P Lending in Portfolio Performance

The software also comes with a lot of other features that I like and which make my life a lot easier. Let’s take a look at some of them.

• Calculation shows a nice summary of your earnings, deposits etc. during your selected time period.

• Earnings gives you a nice overview of your monthly income from P2P lending.

• As well as your earnings by Quarter or Year.

• Under Month you can also see your progression compared to the previous months and to the previous year, which can be very motivating to follow over time.

• Last but not least, Holdings shows your percentage allocation to each peer to peer platform in your portfolio. This is another feature I really love and which can make the decision making process of where to allocate more funds easier.

Conclusion

While Portfolio Performance was originally programmed to track other investments like stocks and ETFs (I have yet to experiment with adding my own ETFs to it), I’ve been using the software for over a year now and think it works very well to track investments in P2P lending.

Once you’re done setting up all of your accounts, it should now take you very little time and effort to keep track of your peer-to-peer investment portfolio and to calculate your (actual) returns in the long run.

Some links you might be interested in:

• English Support Forum (Portfolio Performance)
• The Latest P2P Bonus & Cashback Offers in November
• My P2P Lending Income in October (319€)

Video of the article