# How a loan

A loan leaves the book in one of three ways: it is **charged off**, it is **paid off**, or it **exits** for some other reason, such as being sold, participated out, or transferred to another servicer. Vintage calls that event the loan's **ending**. Every loan has **at most one** ending, and Vintage decides it once, from everything your data says about the loan, before any curve is computed.

Everything that reads a loan's fate reads that one answer: the credit-loss curve, the prepayment speeds, the Portfolio screen's Status column, and the counts Vintage keeps of what it excluded. Two parts of the product can therefore never disagree about when or how a loan ended.

How the loss of a charged-off loan is measured is on [Charge-offs and recoveries](/concepts/charge-offs-and-recoveries/); how payoffs and exits feed the measures is on [Payoffs and exits](/concepts/payoffs-and-exits/).

## The three endings and what signals each

| Ending | What it means | What in your data signals it |
|---|---|---|
| **Charged off** | The lender wrote the loan off as a loss | A Charge-Off Flag value you marked as the event; a Loan Status or Closure Reason value you classified **Charged off**; a charge-off amount; a Charge-Off Date; a charge-off row in a typed transaction ledger |
| **Paid off** | The borrower repaid the loan in full | A Payoff Flag or Prepayment Flag value you marked as the event; a status value you classified **Paid off**; a Payoff Amount; a Payoff Date; a payoff row in a typed ledger |
| **Exited (other)** | The loan left the book for a reason that is neither a payoff nor a default | A Loan Status or Closure Reason value you classified **Exited (other)** |

Flags and status values signal an ending only because you said so. At Column Mapping you classify each value your core uses, and an unclassified value is never guessed and signals nothing. A distress status that is still being worked, such as a foreclosure in process or a bankruptcy filing, is suggested as **Open (still active)**, because the loan is still on the book. See [Classifying values](/uploading/classifying-values/).

A **Closed Date** is different. It says *when* a loan closed but not *how*, so it supplies the timing for whichever ending the rest of your data proves, and never decides which ending it was on its own. A Closed Snapshot Month column is recognized and stored, but Vintage takes timing from the dates and markers above instead, so it feeds no measurement.

## Where you see a loan's ending

The **Status** column on the Portfolio screen is Vintage's resolved answer, not your status word passed through:

| Status column reads | Meaning |
|---|---|
| **Charged off**, **Paid off**, or **Exited (other)** | The ending Vintage resolved for the loan |
| **Open**, with a faint **"No exit reported"** beneath | The data proves no ending |
| An ending, with a faint **"Closed before data begins"** beneath | The loan's ending was on the first row Vintage ever saw for it (see below) |

"No exit reported" is deliberate. Three quite different situations produce a loan with no ending: a loan that stopped reporting while it still owed money, a zero-balance loan past its term that nobody marked closed, and a payoff partway through the history whose later rows carry no marker. The column states why the loan reads open rather than claiming it is alive. See [The Portfolio screen](/portfolio/the-portfolio-screen/).

## The five rules, in order

Vintage resolves each loan's ending by applying these rules in order.

### 1. Each candidate ending is dated from the most specific evidence

A loan can carry several signals for the same ending, reported at different times. Vintage dates each candidate ending from the strongest evidence available for it, in this order:

1. An explicit **Charge-Off Date** or **Payoff Date**.
2. A **Closed Date**, which supplies timing only.
3. The **first month a marker appears**: a classified status value or a flag value marked as the event.
4. The **month an amount is reported**: a charge-off amount or a payoff amount.
5. An event that appears only in a **transaction file**, dated by its Transaction Date.

Where a snapshot and a transaction file disagree about the same quantity for the same loan in the same month, the snapshot wins and the ledger figure is set aside.

### 2. The earliest ending wins

A loan reported charged off in March and paid off in June ended in March. When two kinds of ending land in the **same** month, **charge-off outranks payoff, and payoff outranks an exit**. A default is the fact a lender most needs measured, so it is never hidden behind a payoff recorded the same month.

### 3. The ending is placed on a month your data has

Vintage measures loans month by month on the snapshot months you reported. If the ending's month is one you reported, the ending is placed there. Otherwise it is placed on the **next** reported month, and, failing that, on the loan's **last** reported month. An ending is never dropped for falling between snapshots.

This matters for quarterly or irregular files. If you report snapshots in December and March and a loan's Charge-Off Date is in February, the charge-off is placed on the March snapshot.

### 4. It books exactly once, from that month's starting balance

An ending books once, in the month it is placed, against the balance the loan was carrying at the start of that month. A sticky status that keeps reading "charged off" for a year books **one** event, in the first month it appeared: not one per month it lingers, and not at the age it happens to stop. A flag that arrives a month before its amount books the event at the flag, on the balance the loan was actually carrying then.

### 5. Anything reported after the ending is post-terminal

Months reported after a loan's ending are **post-terminal**: they are left out of the curves and counted. A later amount is read against the figure already standing. The same figure repeated books nothing, a risen figure books its increase once as a true-up, and a different, smaller figure books in full, because the column has shown it reports each month's own activity. A loss or recovery reported after the ending books at the **age of the ending**, not the age it was reported. The details, with an example, are on [Charge-offs and recoveries](/concepts/charge-offs-and-recoveries/#the-same-charge-off-figure-repeated-after-the-charge-off).

A column you declared as a running total or year-to-date total is converted to monthly increments before any of this, and its increments keep counting. See [Declaring formats](/uploading/declaring-formats/).

## A worked example

A $20,000 loan is originated in January 2022. Your snapshots are monthly. The loan's rows show:

- Loan Status `DLQ90` (classified **Open (still active)**) through July 2023;
- Loan Status `CO` (classified **Charged off**) from August 2023 onward;
- a Charge-Off Date of 2023-07-28 on the August row;
- a Charge-Off Amount of 12,000 on the September row;
- a Loan Status of `PIF` (classified **Paid off**) in December 2023.

Rule 1 dates the charge-off from the strongest evidence, the Charge-Off Date: July 2023. Rule 1 dates the payoff from the first month its marker appears: December 2023. Rule 2 picks the earlier, so the loan **charged off in July 2023**. Rule 3 places it on the July snapshot, which exists. Rule 4 books it once, from July's starting balance, at age 18. Rule 5 makes August onward post-terminal, so the September amount is read as the loss of that July charge-off and books at age 18, and the December "paid off" status does not give the loan a second ending. The Status column reads **Charged off**.

## When the file disagrees with itself

A loan reported **paid off that then keeps reporting an outstanding balance** is a real contradiction. Vintage does not pick a winner by guessing what the later rows mean. The payoff books once, at the earliest month the data supports, the later months are excluded, and Vintage counts the loan as a contradiction to be checked. It does not re-open a closed loan, and it does not book a second ending. Only your core can say which of the two those later rows mean, so they are worth checking there.

A loan that keeps reporting after a **charge-off** is handled differently, because some books really do carry loans that survive a partial write-down. See [Charge-offs and recoveries](/concepts/charge-offs-and-recoveries/#loans-that-keep-reporting-after-a-charge-off).

## A loan that arrives already ended

When a loan's Origination Date is **earlier than your first snapshot month** and its ending lands on the **very first row** Vintage ever sees for it, there is no month in which Vintage observed it at risk. Its ending is real, but dating it to the month you started exporting would record it at an invented age. For a charge-off, that would place a genuine loss at an age the loan was never observed at, against a denominator that never existed.

Such a loan books **no event and no loss**, is held out of the curves, and is counted separately from every other exclusion. The Portfolio screen shows its ending with **"Closed before data begins"**. What would bring it in is a snapshot from before it closed.

The same happens if a loan becomes "already ended" later because you re-classify a status value on the Fields screen. Once the portfolio finishes updating, the Status column shows it.

**Changing a classification re-reads the whole book:** Editing what a status, flag, or transaction-type value means on the Fields screen re-resolves every loan's ending from every upload. While that runs, the Portfolio and Modeling screens say the portfolio is updating; Modeling keeps showing the last complete analysis until every loan has been re-read. See [Fields](/portfolio/fields/).

## Loans with no ending

A loan whose data proves no ending stays open in Vintage's view, and the Status column says "No exit reported". For modeling, two further rules apply to open loans without changing their status:

- A loan that **stops appearing** in your snapshots before the portfolio's latest month, while it still owed a balance and more than three months before the end of its term, is treated as having **paid off** for the prepayment measure. This is an inference, not a resolved ending, and it never applies to a loan whose ending was resolved or that arrived already ended. See [Payoffs and exits](/concepts/payoffs-and-exits/#inferred-payoffs).
- A loan that matured, or ran past its term, keeps counting toward later ages in the credit-loss denominator up to the as-of date (your portfolio's latest snapshot month). See [Credit loss measurement](/concepts/credit-loss-measurement/).

## Related

- [Charge-offs and recoveries](/concepts/charge-offs-and-recoveries/)
- [Payoffs and exits](/concepts/payoffs-and-exits/)
- [Classifying values](/uploading/classifying-values/)
- [The Portfolio screen](/portfolio/the-portfolio-screen/)
- [Credit loss measurement](/concepts/credit-loss-measurement/)
- [Missing and unreported data](/concepts/missing-data/)