Fixing the opening balance

Every reconciliation check starts from somewhere: an account’s Opening Balance, the balance immediately before its first transaction. If that starting number is wrong, every balance after it will look wrong too — not because anything downstream is broken, but because the whole chain is measured from the wrong zero point.

This tends to show up when you import an account’s history starting partway through — say your bank statements only go back to March, but the account existed before that. Finzu doesn’t know the true balance on March 1st, so it has nothing correct to measure from.

Fixing it

You tell finzu the real opening balance — from your bank’s own record of it — and finzu pins that as the account’s starting point. Every balance after it is then checked against that corrected starting line, and (assuming the rest of the history is intact) the whole ledger lines up.

This is different from reordering: reordering fixes transactions that are present but misplaced. Fixing the opening balance fixes the starting assumption the entire chain is measured against — get that one number right, and everything built on top of it becomes trustworthy again.

Next: what it means when a specific transaction is marked uncertain.