Reported vs Running Balance

Most people assume a balance is just a balance. Finzu keeps two, and the difference between them is the whole reason its ledger is trustworthy.

• Reported Balance — what the statement itself claims, for a given transaction. It always traces back to something your bank actually printed or declared; finzu never invents one.
• Running Balance — what finzu computes: the account’s starting balance plus every transaction’s amount, added up in order, all the way to that point.

When a bank’s numbers are clean, these two agree on every transaction — because they’re two ways of arriving at the same truth. When they disagree, that’s not a bug. That’s finzu catching something: a transaction out of order, a gap in what was imported, a statement that doesn’t quite reconcile. Instead of picking one number and hiding the conflict, finzu shows you both, so you can see exactly where reality and the bank’s own paperwork parted ways.

Why finzu keeps both instead of just one

A ledger that only stored one balance would have to guess, silently, which one was right whenever they disagreed — and you’d never know it happened. Keeping both makes disagreement visible instead of erased, which is what turns “the app says $4,213” into a number you can actually stand behind.

Every flag, repair, and “this needs attention” you’ll see elsewhere in finzu comes back to this one distinction.