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.
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.
Public reviews of one widely used checkbook app describe what the problem looks like from the outside: balances off by hundreds after syncing between two phones, three years of entries suddenly doubled, one register reading more than a hundred thousand dollars in the negative. Those are things reviewers report, not findings of ours.
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.
- 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".
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, the app looks for the cause instead of guessing. It checks for an unticked entry equal to the difference, a ticked one that does not belong on this statement, two entries that add up to the difference, a payment entered as a deposit, and two digits typed the wrong way round. When it finds one, it points to that entry in your list. When it finds nothing it invents nothing, and it offers to record the difference as a labeled adjustment you can delete later. A statement closed that way is stamped "with adjustment", never "to the penny".
A statement that stops being true says so
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".
No bank connection, no account, no sign-in. Just your entries, added up in front of you, every time you look.