Some questions about how keep bank account balances accurate

1

Hello,

We started using Goodbudget about a month ago. Our financial landscape includes:

  • Our personal finances
  • Wife’s business
  • Husband’s business

We need to have transparency into each other’s businesses so we can plan, budget, etc. We have connected all of our bank accounts - both business and personal - to Goodbudget.

Some things we don’t understand:

  • Why are we able to change what is shown in our bank accounts through Goodbudget? The list of accounts started out accurate to our actual balances, but as we processed and categorized transactions, the numbers became desynced. Now they are completely off. This doesn’t make any sense to me - how can my activities in the budgeting app change what it thinks are my actual account balances? Whatever I do in the app, shouldn’t my actual balances be only affected by actions on them - transactions that show up through the bank?
  • Every time we transfer money from one account to another, there are two transactions - a debit on one account and a credit on the other. This makes sense to me. What doesn’t make sense is that after we categorize them as transfers, our total available amount changes. My understanding is that Goodbudget is agnostic about which account our money is in, it just cares about what is available in our whole system. So why do our transfers change the available amount at all?
  • The only way we have found to stop our activities from changing the available balance is to delete all of the transfers as they show up. This feels incorrect but we can’t see any other way to prevent transfers from affecting our available balance. Also, doing so seems to be why our accounts are now out of sync.
  • Now that my accounts are desynced from reality, I don’t know how to get them to resync. Is there any way to force Goodbudget to redownload our actual account balances? If there is, will it prompt us about how to fix whatever went wrong that caused them to become out of sync? Right now, some of our accounts show as thousands of dollars in the red and others show as having way more money in them than we actually do. We haven’t done a full audit to see if the total across all accounts is accurate - we will soon and it will take some time because it’s a bunch of checking and savings accounts across three logins with the bank.

We’d appreciate any guidance you can give us. We’re very motivated to learn how to use the system and get our budgeting leveled up. Right now it’s feeling like the system isn’t connected to reality in a way that makes sense and we’re a bit lost.

Thank you very much for any help you can give!

2

Hi @heidijoandben Thanks for your post! I’ll try to address your points below:

Why are we able to change what is shown in our bank accounts through Goodbudget?

The ability to link your Goodbudget Accounts to an external bank account is a relatively new feature. Before that, tracking your Account balance in Goodbudget was completely manual. As such, you needed to be able to manually add your balance. Even with Bank Sync, Account balances can become mismatched from what folks have in real life, so there needs to be a way to manually correct it, if needed.

how can my activities in the budgeting app change what it thinks are my actual account balances?

Goodbudget doesn’t continually sync your balance from your bank. It only grabs your bank balance once at the time you create your bank connection. From that point on, the balance you see in Goodbudget is the result of math that happens when your transactions sync down from your bank.

So why do our transfers change the available amount at all?

When you have automatically imported transactions that are unassigned from an Envelope, they temporarily sit in your Available Envelope and impact its balance. After your convert the transaction into a Transfer (or assign it to an Envelope), it no longer is impacting the Available because you’ve told Goodbudget which kind of transaction it is (or where it belongs). As a result, your Available balance adjusts.

Now that my accounts are desynced from reality, I don’t know how to get them to resync. Is there any way to force Goodbudget to redownload our actual account balances?

Goodbudget isn’t continually syncing your bank balance. But you can manually correct your Account balance by updating your ‘Current Balance’ on the ‘Add/Edit’ Account screen. From there, so long as your transaction data in Goodbudget matches your bank data, your Account balances should continue to match what you have in real life.

Hope this all makes sense!
Karisa