You can update the balance of an account via the button in the Account details screen. You open the account details by tapping on a row in the list on the Accounts screen.
Account balances are used for the Net Worth graph and to determine if you have reached a Target. Apart from that they are shown on the Accounts list screen. These are three good reasons to periodically check the account balances in FiQu with your bank statements or with what is actually still in your wallet. And update if necessary via this screen.
Only transactions (expenses or income) are used to analyze your spending, either using budgets or the nine graphs apart from Net Worth. You don’t need accurate account balances here.
Why periodically update account balances?
The current account balance is calculated from the most recent entered or imported value plus all transactions since that date. If no balance is ever set, this calculation starts from zero. There are two reasons to still check your account balances:
- You might have missed a transaction or entered a wrong amount. Causing the balance of that account to no longer be in sync with your bank statement.
- You have accounts for which transactions make no sense, so you don’t enter them. In that case you must periodically enter a recent balance amount. A good example is your savings account or investment porfolio: transactions like money you deposited, interest you earned or stock price increases, do not add insights in your spending. So all you need to do for such accounts is enter a new balance e.g. at the end of every month. No transactions needed.
Update Account balance screen
You can enter any amount as balance, in the currency you selected for this account.
Tap on the date to select a different date than today. You can’t pick a future date, because only actually achieved balances should be entered. Not projected ones.
Every account can have only one balance amount per day. Any previous value for that date is automatically overwritten by a new update via this screen or import of balances (see below).
Only the balance with the most recent date is shown on the Account list and account details screen. But entering historic balances is useful for an accurate Net Worth graph over a longer period or analysis of how you were progressing towards a target in the past.
Balance date: end of day
This means that you should take any transactions of this day into account. Example: your bank statement or banking app showed $1,000 in your account yesterday evening. This morning you want to update the balance of this account in FiQu. You know you are going to spend $100 today. The balance amount you enter with today’s Date is $900. Because that is what the balance actually will be end of this day.
Importing many balance amounts for one account
You can import any number of historic balances of an account at once by using the upload function on the Transactions screen as explained here. You don’t need any transaction details, only a date and a balance amount, as shown in the sample file below.
If you open this .ODS (Open Document Spreadsheet format) file, either with Libre Office Calc or Microsoft Excel, it will look like this:
Importing historic account balances for multiple accounts
In the above example, the column ‘account name’ in the .ODS import-spreadsheet is empty. You select the right amount using the import button on the Transactions screen. However, this allows only one account per spreadsheet.
If you want to upload balance amounts for multiple accounts in one go, you have to do the following:
- Fill the column account name, with the exact name of one of the accounts on the Accounts list screen. You can use as many accounts as you want in the same spreadsheet; in any order.
- Import your .ODS file with account names filled using the Import button on the Settings screen.