I feel like an idiot asking this quesiton, but how do I reconcile my budget? None of my accounts match what the actual financial institutions say I have, even though I have been obsessive in recording everything. I don’t know how everything can be off.
For my smallest credit card, I erased its entire history, then went through and re-entered everything since January 1 of this year (when I started using Goodbudget). It STILL didn’t match up.
I’m a visual learner, and it’s very hard to read the posts and understand what is happening. Are there any videos that will show how to do this?
I don’t know of videos specific to this, but I think I could help with screenshots. There are a few things I’d want to know to make sure you get on the right track:
How are you attempting to reconcile your accounts today? Do you change the balances of the accounts themselves, then try to reconcile? Do you have a lot of unreconciled transactions in your register? How often do you want to reconcile?
I struggled a bit the very first time I did reconciliations, then again as I worked to get everything adjusted, but I learned a lot of tips along the way (many the hard way!) and I’d love to try to help!
Sorry for the trouble reconciling! Based on what you’ve said, my guess is that your Accounts are missing a starting balance. Without a starting balance, your Account will never match what your bank says. You can check to see if your Account has an opening balance transaction by scrolling to the start of your transaction history for that particular Account. If you don’t see a transaction that says ‘Created [Account Name]’, then you’re missing that vital transaction.
If that’s the case, you can quickly fix that by updating your Account’s balance to make it match what you have right now. (Do that on the web by clicking on Add/Edit on the Accounts tab and then updating your Balance.) Then, you can edit the Account Adjustment transaction and back-date it to the start date of the Account. You should be able to reconcile after that.