When a balance disagrees with your bank

You open SageFin, you open your banking app, and the two numbers are not the same. One of them looks wrong, and it is reasonable to want to know which. Usually this is timing and it resolves itself. Sometimes it is a gap worth knowing about — and SageFin can tell you which of the two you are looking at.

The everyday reason: you are looking at different moments

SageFin does not sit inside your bank. It receives data — from a provider, on a schedule — and shows you the most recent thing it received. Your banking app shows you this instant.

So a difference of a few hours, or of one transaction, is almost always just that: the coffee you bought twenty minutes ago has reached your bank and has not yet reached us.

The Last update row on the Connection status card is what tells you how far apart those two moments are. If it says this morning, a difference is expected. If it says last week, the question is not really about the balance — see when an account stops updating.

Pending transactions

The second everyday reason. A card payment often appears twice on its journey: first as pending, with an amount the merchant has authorized, and later as posted, with the amount actually charged. They are not always the same — a restaurant authorizes more than the bill to leave room for a tip, and a fuel pump authorizes a round number before it knows what you pumped.

Banks differ in which balance they show you, and many show a balance that counts pending transactions in one place and not in another. If your bank's app and SageFin disagree by exactly the amount of something you bought today, this is almost certainly why, and it settles itself within a few days.

The Balance check card

Underneath timing, there is a more interesting question: do the transactions add up to the balance?

SageFin keeps two things — the balance your bank reports, and the feed of transactions. Those are separate pieces of information, and comparing them is something most personal finance apps never do. The Balance check card on an account page is that comparison.

It says one of three things.

"Transactions explain every balance change through [date]." The two agree. Every change in the reported balance is accounted for by transactions we have. This is the normal state, and it is most accounts most of the time.

"Off by [amount] since [date]." They do not agree. The balance moved by more than the transactions we hold can explain, and it started on that date.

"No transactions have arrived for this account through [date], so there is nothing to check." The balance has not moved and no transactions have come in, so the comparison had nothing in it. That is not the same as the two agreeing, and the card no longer says it is: an account you are not using looks exactly like one whose transaction feed has quietly stopped, and neither of them has been checked.

The card appears only where the comparison is possible. A manual account has nothing to compare; an investment account moves for reasons transactions do not describe; a newly connected account has not yet reported two balances; and an account your bank has stopped listing has nobody left to compare against. Where the check does not apply, the card is simply not there — its absence is the answer rather than an error. If the check itself fails to load, the card says so, because a request that failed tells you nothing about the account.

What "off by" actually means

It means a transaction is missing from what we were given, not that money has gone missing.

The usual cause is that the provider's feed had a gap: a period where the connection was broken, a bank that does not supply older transactions on a first connection, or a transaction the provider never sent. The date matters more than the amount, because it tells you when the feed stopped explaining the balance — which is often recognisably the week a connection broke.

Two things are worth knowing:

• Today's balance is still your bank's number. The drift lands in history, not in the current balance, because the balance is reported to us directly rather than calculated from transactions.
• It does not fix itself, in the way a pending transaction does. A gap in the feed stays a gap unless the missing transactions arrive.

What to do about a difference

If it is small and recent, wait a day. Pending transactions settle and the next sync arrives. Most differences are gone by the following morning.

If Last update is old, fix the connection first. A balance cannot be current if nothing has arrived for a week. That page covers reconnecting.

If the Balance check says drifting and the date means something to you — the week you switched banks, or the month a connection was broken — then the gap is explained even if it is not filled, and you can decide whether it matters enough to correct.

If you want the number to be right, edit it. For accounts you maintain by hand, the balance is yours to set. For a connected account, adding the missing transactions is what closes the gap; changing the balance alone would only move the disagreement somewhere else.

If none of that fits, tell us. The ⋯ menu on the Connection status card has Contact support. The two useful details are the account and the date the drift started.