A policy snapshot and a tracked policy loan answer different questions:
- The snapshot stores the carrier-reported loan balance for the policy's Actual position, Net CV, and charts on one date.
- The tracked loan records draws, repayments, and manual Current Balance corrections made inside Policy Stack.
Saving or editing a snapshot does not proportionally overwrite existing draws. The latest snapshot owns the carrier balance; any material increase is one canonical draw, nominal growth is capitalized interest, and a decrease can be characterized as repayment.
What Saving a Snapshot Does
Manual entry, portal-screenshot extraction, and annual-statement extraction all create or update the same kind of point-in-time snapshot record. The newest snapshot drives the current policy position; older snapshots remain history.
If a positive snapshot loan balance is recorded when the policy does not have a loan account yet, the account is created with that balance as its starting balance. Once a loan account exists, later snapshots do not silently replace its Current Balance — to enter a starting balance on an existing account, use Adding Past Loan Activity.
The carrier snapshot is the source for the displayed policy position. The tracked loan remains the source for event history. A difference between them is something to review, not an automatic proportional adjustment.
When the Statement Has No Loan Line
A blank loan line and a reported $0 are different statements about the same field, and Policy Stack treats them differently:
- A reported $0 is a carrier figure. It reconciles the account to zero and the loan reads as repaid.
- A blank loan line is the absence of a figure. It can mean the loan was repaid — or that the line simply was not on that statement. A partial portal screenshot and an extraction that did not capture the loan line look identical once stored.
So when a snapshot leaves the loan balance blank and there is a balance the blank would erase — either an earlier snapshot reported one, or your recorded loan account still holds one — that balance is held rather than dropped to $0, and a follow-up asks what the blank means. The question appears whether the snapshot was entered by hand or came in through a statement import:
- Loan is paid off — record $0 records the payoff.
- It wasn't on this statement — keep [prior amount] keeps the prior figure as the recorded balance.
- Decide later leaves the question open without recording anything.
Until it is answered, the policy's row on the Loans page marks that balance Unconfirmed, and the held balance keeps counting in Net CV and In Use. Answering records the confirmed figure on that snapshot's own loan balance, so the marker clears itself and that statement is not asked about again. If another blank statement is saved while the question is still open, it is asked again — an unresolved hold keeps asking rather than quietly resolving itself.
Two things narrow when this is asked. Blank-line handling applies to whole life policies only — a term or convertible-term policy has no loan line to leave blank, so its permanent blank is never read as one. And within whole life, the question arises only where the blank would erase a balance that actually exists. There are two ways that happens: an earlier statement reported an outstanding loan, or no statement ever reported one but the recorded loan account still holds a balance from a draw entered in the app. That second case matters because a carrier statement is not the only place a loan balance comes from — a policy loan you record yourself is just as real, and a blank statement should not quietly erase it. A policy with neither — no reported loan and no funded loan account — records a blank as $0 with no prompt and no marker, which is the large majority of blank loan lines.
When the held figure comes from the loan account rather than a statement, the question says so: it refers to your recorded loan account, not to something a statement showed, because no statement showed it.
A reported figure still reconciles on any policy type. Only the blank-line handling is scoped to whole life.
A held balance is a question, not a problem — the loan may well have been repaid. Policy Stack asks rather than choosing, because silently recording $0 would drop a real loan balance out of every surface that reads it.
Detected Activity Follow-Ups
After the snapshot is saved, Policy Stack compares it with the previous snapshot. When the loan-balance change is larger than expected interest and there is no matching event already recorded, the dialog can ask whether the difference was:
- A loan repayment when the balance decreased
- A draw against an existing policy loan when the balance increased
The suggested amount removes expected interest from the difference and ignores small changes below the detection threshold. If a matching ledger event was already recorded near the snapshot date, Policy Stack does not ask again.
For a detected repayment, choose the loan when more than one is active, review the amount, date, and payment type, then use Log repayment. That records the repayment and changes the selected tracked loan once. Just interest and Skip close the prompt without adding a repayment or changing the tracked loan.
For a detected increase, choose Deployed into an asset and select the recorded asset, or choose Personal use, select a purpose category, and optionally add a note. Log draw records the draw and its characterization against the existing policy loan and changes that tracked balance once. It does not create a second loan. If no active policy loan is available, the full loan form is offered instead.
Policy Stack checks whether the account's snapshot flow already moved the tracked balance. The follow-up either applies the event once or records only its characterization; it never applies the same balance movement twice.
When the Per-Loan Repayment Dialog Returns an Error
Some older loans retain a snapshot_reconciliation last-change marker from a previous balance-update flow. If a new repayment contains more principal than that loan's current tracked balance, the dialog explains that state instead of returning only a generic limit error.
Review the amount and payment type. You can log no more principal than the current tracked balance, or edit Current Balance on the loan detail page before recording the repayment. Editing a snapshot does not rewrite that tracked balance in the current production flow.
See Logging a Loan Repayment for the policy-level walkthrough.
Order of Operations
Both orders preserve the carrier-reported snapshot. The tracked loan changes only when an event or Current Balance correction is recorded:
- Log the event first, then the snapshot — the draw or repayment updates the tracked loan and creates its event history. The snapshot then records the carrier position.
- Snapshot first, then accept the follow-up — the snapshot records the carrier position; the accepted draw or repayment updates the tracked loan once and creates the event history.
- Snapshot first, then skip the follow-up — the snapshot position is recorded, but the tracked loan remains unchanged and can differ from the carrier figure.
The first two paths can align both records when the entered event matches the carrier difference. Skip records no event.
What Appears in the Banking Ledger
The snapshot is the source-linked balance record. A snapshot-backed draw or repayment follow-up reuses that movement and adds only the missing characterization, so one carrier change cannot become two loan movements. Older accounts can retain historical rows from the previous flow.
Draws recorded directly through IBLOC Record draw, and through a policy-loan timeline where that action is available, also write a Loan Disbursement line. That line represents the draw amount; interest and fees remain separate events.
When Tracked Balances Drift
If events are not recorded between snapshots, the snapshot history still preserves the carrier-reported total. A follow-up can record one detected draw or repayment difference, but it cannot reconstruct every event that occurred across a long gap. Use Add past activity to enter each historical draw's original amount and current remaining balance; those history rows do not change the latest snapshot balance.
Policy Stack does not silently distribute a snapshot difference across existing draws. Review the snapshot position and the source-linked draw/repayment characterization; the latest snapshot balance remains the authority.
IBLOCs Are Not Updated by Snapshots
Insurance-Backed Lines of Credit (IBLOCs) are issued by a third-party bank, not by the carrier, so they don't appear on carrier statements. The snapshot's loan balance field captures the carrier-issued policy-loan balance only. Maintain an IBLOC with Record draw, Record repayment, or Edit Loan on its detail page.
If you have both a carrier policy loan and an IBLOC against the same policy, the snapshot records the carrier-loan figure and updates collateral cash value used by IBLOC LTV; it does not change either tracked loan automatically. See How IBLOCs Interact with Snapshots.