If your balance and your register have stopped agreeing
Why a checkbook app shows the wrong balance
A saved balance can drift away from the entries it came from. If an app keeps your balance as a number of its own and edits that number every time you add or change an entry, then one edit missed, or one run twice, leaves the saved number no longer matching your register. Nothing warns you. The register looks right and the figure above it is wrong.
The app: free to try, $9.99 once. App Store · Google Play
We cannot see inside another company’s app, so we cannot tell you that is what happened to yours. We can tell you that BalanceWright is built so it cannot make that mistake. It never saves a balance.
BalanceWright is the checkbook register app this page is about. BalanceWright is a phone app for iPhone and Android. It is not a budgeting app, and it does not connect to your bank. BalanceWright is out now, on the App Store and on Google Play.
BalanceWright does not save a balance at all
Think of the paper register in your checkbook. You do not keep a separate slip with your balance written on it. You start from the last figure you trust and add down the column. Find a mistake in March, fix it, add down from there, and the bottom of the page is right again.
The app works that same way. Open the register and the figure at the top is worked out right then: it starts from the opening balance you typed when you set up the account and adds your entries up again. Your balance is never saved, so there is nowhere for it to sit and go stale. That is not a promise about how careful we are. It is the shape of the program.
Three figures, all worked out from the same entries
The register shows three, because the three answer different questions. None of them is stored anywhere. Every one of them is added up again each time you look.
- Register balance$2,418.57
- Everything you have written down — money in, money out, whether or not the bank has seen it yet. This is the figure at the top of your register.
- Cleared$2,285.82
- Only the entries the bank has seen. This is the one that should agree with the statement in your hand, and the one you reconcile against.
- After scheduled bills$1,543.57
- The register balance with bills you have set down but not yet paid taken off it. It is a look ahead. It is never presented as your balance.
What follows from not saving it
- Correct an entry from three years ago and every figure after it adds itself up again.
- The order you typed things in does not matter. A check written down late lands on its own date.
- A bill you have scheduled but not paid never touches your real balance. It is added up separately, under “After scheduled bills”.
That third one is the rule people write in about. Pension, rent, insurance, tithe: set them down once and they appear on the day they are due, marked scheduled. They move only your projected balance until you post them. Nothing is ever posted behind your back.
Those rules are checked by machine, not by eye. The arithmetic is run against thousands of registers built at random, with entries added, backdated, deleted, transferred and reconciled in whatever order the machine picks. Every run checks that the balance still equals the opening figure plus the entries.
Then you prove it against the paper statement
A balance that agrees with itself is half the job. It has to agree with the bank. Reconciling works the way you already do it at the kitchen table.
You type the date on the statement and the ending balance it shows. Then you tick off each entry the bank has seen. A panel at the bottom of the screen reads Off by and counts down as you go, and it does not scroll away. At zero it reads Balanced.
The button that locks the statement stays switched off until the difference is exactly $0.00, because an app that lets you close a statement that does not balance is selling the same false comfort you are leaving.
If the difference will not close, it looks for the cause
It runs the checks an accountant runs, in this order, because the simple explanations are the likely ones:
- An entry you have not ticked that is exactly the difference.
- An entry you have ticked that does not belong on this statement.
- Two unticked entries that add up to the difference between them.
- A payment entered as a deposit, or a deposit entered as a payment.
- Two digits typed the wrong way round — 51.00 for 15.00.
When it finds one, it points to that entry in your list. When it finds nothing, it invents nothing. It offers instead to record the difference as a labeled adjustment you can delete later — and a statement closed that way never says to the penny. It names the adjustment instead, and it goes on naming it every time you look at that statement again.
A statement that stops being true says so
Tick each entry off against your paper statement and watch the difference land on $0.00. Once you lock a statement it is settled, and an app update does not rewrite it.
Locked entries can still be corrected, but not quietly: opening one tells you that changing it will unlock it from that statement, and whether the statement will stop balancing.
The Statements screen does not trust its own figures either. Every time you open it, each statement is added up again from your entries, and if something dated on or before one has changed since, that row stops saying to the penny and says no longer balances.
That is the whole trick, and it is the same trick three times over: nothing that can go stale is written down. It works with no internet connection. There is no bank login, so there is no password of yours to lose and no sync to break.
What to do this week, whatever app you end up with
If your register and your bank have stopped agreeing, the fastest way to find out where is to reconcile one statement by hand. Take the last paper statement, tick each entry off against your register, and see what is left over. The five checks above are the ones to run, in that order, and they work on paper exactly as well as they work in software.
Whatever the difference turns out to be, get a copy of your history out of the app you have now before you change anything — a CSV file, or a printout. A register you can read without that app is the one thing no update can take off you.
