What installments are for – Financing

What installments are forFinancingYou know that installments schedule a source's money rather than adding to it, and what an installment can and cannot carry.Money rarely arrives in one piece. A fund pays 40% on signature, 40% on start of shooting and 20% on delivery of the final accounts. **Installments are how you write that down.**They schedule; they do not addThe source's Amount **is** the money. Installments say when parts of it arrive.They are never added on top of the source, and they are never summed into the plan's totals separately — a plan with a €500,000 fund split into three installments still shows €500,000, not €1,000,000. The aggregate functions bear this out: they sum sources only, and never touch the installment level.The consequence is freeing: you can add installments to a source at any time without touching a single total.What they are actually forTwo jobs, and the second is the one people miss.1. **A payment schedule you can read** — the plan shows what is expected when. 2. **They are what makes Received work.** A row counts as received when its cash-flow rule resolves to a date in the past. Once a source has installments, it is the **installments'** rules that are read — the source's own rule is no longer consulted. So an unpaid fund and a fund already half paid look different in the rail only if its installments are scheduled — see [what Received and Outstanding mean](/kb/article/what-received-and-outstanding-mean).What an installment carries — and what it does notAn installment has a **name**, an **amount**, a **currency**, a **status** and a **cash-flow rule**. That is the whole list.It has **no detail panel**. A source has company, effect, tax, tags, notes and attachments; an installment has none of them, and there is no way to reach them. Detail belongs to the financier, and the financier is the source.They live in the Set Cash Flow Rule dialogInstallments are not edited in the grid like other rows. They are added, renamed, scheduled and deleted inside the **Set Cash Flow Rule** dialog of their source — which is also the only route to an installment's own rule. Pressing delete with an installment selected **opens that dialog** rather than removing the row.That is deliberate, and it surprises everyone the first time — see [add installments to a source](/kb/article/add-installments-to-a-source).Markdown