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…
- In this example, we made our first deposit on October 3rd, withdrew some money on October 10th and added our monthly interest on November 1st.
How To Track Your Existing Peer to Peer Lending Accounts
If you have existing accounts, which is likely the case for most of you, of course it’s going to take you a little while to set up everything correctly. Still, it’s going to be way less effort than using other tools like Excel to track everything.
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
From the documents, add your total income as interest to Portfolio Performance. Additionally, check your e-mails for your deposit/withdrawal dates.
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.
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
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Valuable Resources
- My Investment Tools
A list containing all my investments in P2P Lending, the brokerage accounts I use to buy ETFs, my speculative investments in Bitcoin and my free bank accounts. It even includes the tools I use for blogging and YouTube. - P2P Bonus Offers
A collection of all the best, currently available bonus and cashback offers in the P2P lending space. Regularly updated.
Disclaimer: Investing involves risks of losses. You should always do your own research before investing into anything. Also, some of the links are affiliate links, which help support me, the website & YouTube channel. I only link to services I use myself, none of them are sponsored.
Nice!
Switched from my old excel to this! =) It will probably be easier to keep track of all platforms.
thank you Daniel! Great, I‘m very happy to hear it seems to have made your life easier as well 🙂
HI,
super thanks for the tip. Have been using an excel sheet and that using infogram for visualisation, now gonna give a to this one. Thanks for the great blog and all the tips.
you’re very welcome Tomas, I’m very happy to hear that!
Hello& thanks for good article!
I have some questions:
1. Should I enter exact deposit dates or just all of deposits from the whole month on one day summed up? (Just like you add interest)
2. Can I use in report interval settings “since” function instead of “first deposit date-current date” function?
Thanks!
P.
Hi Przemek,
thank you!
1. I would add the exact deposit & withdrawal dates if you want more accurate calculations (it’s what I do).
2. Yes you can – but in that case just remember it will show the internal rate of return until the current day, which could differ from the last day when you updated your portfolio (when you last added the interest payments you received). That’s why I use “from – to” the last date I updated everything.
I’m trying to start using PP using your blog and video as a guide to get started, but i have accounts in 3 currencies in mintos for example. I have euro, kzt and mxn. This pears to not work as you would think in the Statements of assets, its like PP cant handle showing multiple currencies at the same time, it just threats them as equal, which obviously scews the shares between kzt and euro for example. Does anybody know how to handle multiple currencies in PP?
Hello Angelo, thank you for all your articles this is really useful and inspiring to me. For the monitoring of the Portfolio, I see that you use the DEPOSIT, INTEREST and WITHDRAWAL functions, so you only have a general overview of the platform and not of the different projects in the same platform, right? Is it possible to use a function to follow all purchases of different projects for the same platform (for example at WISEFUND and CROWDESTOR I have several projects). I do not know how to get an overview of the money I have placed in different projects on the same platform. If you can help me it would be cool.
Thank you Francois, hearing that makes me very happy! For Crowdestor, here is what I do to calculate all interest (incl. accrued interest that hasn’t been paid out yet): https://youtu.be/Fe8dmft1GPM?t=342
Not the most elegant solution, but it works for me.
As far as just having an overview of how much you have in each project, for that I think logging in and checking “Investments” on Wisefund and “My Investments” on Crowdestor is the only/easiest solution for now. I haven’t found a better way to do that yet.
thank you Angelo for your super fast response, can you explain to me where in the portfolio you save the data for Crowdestor with all the loans and the dates, I searched according to your video, but I can’t find how to do it
sure! Well, I don’t save it in Portfolio Pro, as it’s sadly missing that function. That part of the video was more about calculating all interest on a month by month basis in the Numbers app (you can use Excel on Windows), even for loans that don’t pay interest monthly on Crowdestor.
For tracking your amounts in each project, sadly I don’t have a better option than checking the platforms themselves or adding them to a spreadsheet for example. Sorry if I misunderstood and caused some confusion 🙂
How do you track losses like from Envestio so you have one XIRR number for all of the crowdlending?
I added the last Envestio account balance as “interest charge” in Portfolio Performance – that way it is counted as a loss.
Isn’t adding the referral bonuses etc. as interest in Portfolio Performance a bit wrong and misleading both to yourself and the people you are telling about the XIRR on the platform as the XIRR will be inflated by bonuses which everybody will ot be able to enjoy?
Hi Lars,
I agree, that would make zero sense. I would never add a referral bonus there, only bonuses I received myself as an investor and which are still available for anyone when signing up. For me, those are still part of the returns over time.
Do you follow exactly the same steps to track EstateGuru? Because I think it’s a little different, since at EstateGuru you can have uninvested values.
In my list of accounts, I highlighted the account I wanted to show in GBP and then double-clicked in the Currency column. It gives you a list of currencies and you can show a different one for that particular account/row.
Hi,
I recently started using PP in an attempt to track all my P2P investments.
It seems to workout well for a few, but for example with Mintos, although I tried different ways to import (full list of transactions) or manually add (monthly of the past years, and yearly of the past years), and I’m still of > 20€ when I look at the total account value
(I’m using Mintos since 2015). I import deposits, interest (including interest from repurchases and late payments) fees (for any service fee as well as secondary market discounts) and fee refunds (for late fee earnings and secondary market premiums for example)…. I guess it goes wrong because of some secondary market transactions (buys & sells).
Is anyone working with Mintos able to get close to the total account value?
Thank you so much for providing this content!