Your books don't match the bank

TALISK_HQ compares each account's balance in your books against the closing balance printed on its latest statement. When the two disagree, Ledger › Health shows Your books don't match the bank.

The usual cause is transactions that were imported but never categorized. An uncategorized transaction is not in your books yet, so the balance TALISK_HQ shows is missing that money. Enough of them and the figure drifts a long way from reality; on a credit card it can even flip, so the card reads as money you have rather than money you owe.

1. Open Ledger › Health and find the finding.
2. Click Categorize on the card. It takes you to Ledger › Banking with the waiting transactions from that account already filtered.
3. Clear each one. The balance corrects itself as you go.
4. Click Re-check on the Health panel. The finding clears once the two figures agree.

Claim the GST while you clear them

There are two ways to clear a waiting transaction, and they are not equivalent for sales tax:

• Upload the receipt from the bank line ("Upload receipt" on the row). TALISK_HQ reads the receipt, creates the bill, and matches it to that exact charge. The GST on it is claimed as an input tax credit.
• Give the line a category. This books the expense and fixes the balance, but it records the full tax-inclusive amount as expense and claims no GST.

For a Canadian supplier charging GST or HST, upload the receipt. Categorizing on its own is fine for anything with no recoverable tax on it, such as a foreign supplier, a bank fee, or a wage payment.

If you have categorized everything and the gap is still there, the difference is usually in your opening balance: the figure your books started from doesn't match what the account actually held on that date. Check it against the statement covering your start date and correct it on Ledger › Banking.

You do not have to reconcile a month for this check to run. It uses the statement you already imported, so it works from the day your first statement lands.

With a bank connected, the same check runs daily

Everything above describes the version of this check that compares your books to the latest statement you imported, so it only moves when a statement does. If you have connected a bank, a second version runs against the balance your bank reports on every sync, and you will see Your books are behind your bank instead of, or as well as, the card above.

It is the same problem and the same fix. What differs is speed: a statement arrives monthly, a sync arrives daily, so the connected version tells you within a day or so of the bookkeeping falling behind rather than at the end of the month. You can also see it yourself any time in the Bank says column on Ledger › Banking › Accounts, which shows what your bank reported beside the balance in your books. See Connect a bank or add a statement.

Both cards can appear at once on an account that has statements and a connection. They are not duplicates: one is measured against a statement you imported, the other against your bank this morning, so their dates and figures genuinely differ.

TALISK_HQ holds this check back rather than guess when it cannot make an honest comparison. It stays quiet when your bank connection needs attention (the reported balance is frozen at the last good sync), when the figure is more than a few days old, when two bank accounts share one ledger account, and when the account has no opening balance recorded yet. That last one has its own card.

When the waiting transactions only explain part of it

The card tells you how much clearing them will actually close. If some of the gap is something else, it says so and names the amount, because clearing every waiting line would still leave the account short and it is better to know that before you start than after.

Reconcile the account to find the rest. Two causes are worth checking first: a payment recorded against the wrong account, so the money is in your books but on a different line; and an opening balance that was never right, which leaves the same difference on every statement since.

When there is nothing waiting to be recorded

Usually the difference is transactions that arrived and were never categorized, and clearing them closes it. When there are none, the card says so and asks you to reconcile the account instead, because the cause is something else: either transactions your bank has not sent, or an opening balance that was never right. Do not go looking for lines to categorize in that case, because there aren't any.

A small difference is normal

Your books and your bank are allowed to differ. A cheque you wrote may not have been cashed, or a deposit may still be in transit. TALISK_HQ only raises this once the difference passes $25, and what matters is a gap that keeps growing, which means the bookkeeping has stopped rather than that one item is in flight.