Account balances explained
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Account Balances Explained
My Money keeps track of a number of balances on any given account, on non-investment accounts these typically include:
- Initial Account Balance- initial deposit or a transfer of funds to this account at the time of opening
- Running balance- My Money calculates this to reflect all the transactions as they were applied against the account
- Reconciled balance- value of all transactions manually reconciled against a electronic or paper statement
- Bank reported balance- This value is normally reported to My Money by a bank during account synchronization
- Bank reported available balance- Most banks will also report available funds at synchronization time.
This is how a typical balance panel looks like after synchronization with a bank:
It is clear that the account was last reconciled on 06/18, the reconciled balance was brought up to $4,351.72, on July 10th this account was syncronized with a bank at which point bank reported $542.03 available funds. Currently running balance is standing at $1,813.62
Calculation of running balances
My Money has 2 modes of calculation of running balances, by date and by sort
By Date calculation is closely matching the bank balance calculation.
Imagine that you made 5 transactions on a course of a week, you put in $1 into your account every single day and on Saturday you withdrew $3.
On 07/07(Monday) the account balance was $1, on 07/09 - Wednesday the balance was $3, on 07/12 - Saturday the balance is $6 and then after withdrawal it goes down to $3.
This calculation is fact based and reflects the net of all debits and credits for an account at the end of the week.
Why does my running balance appear to be incorrect?
Imagine you were to resort your register, instead of leaving the default sorting by an entry order or date, you decided to sort by payee name in decreasing order, then withdrawals listen first for the same payee, then most recent transactions first, after all these sorting your register will look like the following:
