Apart from recording transactions, JXCirrus Finance also provides functions to compare your transactions to what is in your bank statements. This is called balancing the accounts...
Lets imagine you have been dutifully recording your transactions for your credit card. Now comes the big test - You have gotten your credit card statement in the mail. You pass the test if the balance you get matches the balance on your credit card statement.
What you can do is:
If it balances, you pass!
(What is a cleared balance? - That is the total you would get if you added all the transactions up that you have ticked off. Sometimes, you may have made more transactions in your account by the time you get your statement, so your statement might be a bit out of date, hence the Cleared Balance is different to the Balance.)
JXCirrus Finance has the concept of planned or estimated
transactions... These are transactions that are going to
happen off in the future, and you want to be reminded to complete
the transaction. An example of this might be a holiday
happening in 6 months time. You can record the
transaction and mark it as planned. When you reach that
transaction date, the app will prompt you to edit the transaction
and perhaps adjust the time and actual amount. This can also be
used to act a reminder for a regular known transaction.
Any transaction with the symbol against it is an estimated
transaction.
When you edit a transaction, pressing on the symbol
next to the amount marks it as a planned transaction.
You can use this symbol to toggle between planned and actual.
If you enter a transaction whose date is in the future, then the
app defaults it to being planned. You can switch that off
by clicking on the symbol (i.e. future transactions don't have
to be plans).
When the current date reaches the date of an planned transaction,
the app will show an alert at the top of the screen to check that
transaction. Clicking on the alert will take you to
the account where the transaction is. You can then
edit the transaction to mark it as not planned (or just press the
button on the toolbar if the amount and date turned out to be
correct).
To mark a transaction as cleared, select the transaction in the
list, and press the button (or Alt-C for the desktop
version). You can also clear a transaction from the
transaction edit dialog - Just press on the
symbol next to the account.
Once a transaction is cleared there are some things you can no longer do with the transaction:
The application does this to make sure that you cannot change anything about the transaction later on and mess up your balance.
When a transaction is cleared, it is marked with a green tick in the transaction list. Note also that the Cleared Balance will change...
If you didn't mean to clear the transaction, you can select it
and press the button.
NOTE: Clearing a transaction basically means that you are confirming that what you have matches what is in your bank statement (date, amount etc). So, make sure it is right before you clear it.
OK - So now lets imagine you have finished marking off your
transactions. You look at your bank statement... The closing
balance on the bank statement matches the Cleared Balance in
JXCirrus Finance... Now, you can mark the account as balanced. To
do this, press the button.
Balancing an account basically means: Yes, the account statement definitely matches what is in the application. Everything is correct...
Once you have marked the account as balanced, all of the cleared transactions are now locked. That means that you cannot Un-Clear the transactions (since un-clearing them and then changing the amount would change the account balance, and you just said that it was correct, didn't you?)
Also - The cleared transactions will no longer be shown in the
transaction list (to make the list more readable). You can still
switch on all transactions (select the to show the additional
toolbar, then press
).
The Statement tool makes balancing accounts a little bit easier...
If you have used JXCirrus Finance for a little while, you may notice a weird thing with the order of the transactions in your bank statements... They are often in a different order. This makes tracking down differences a bit tricky sometimes.
What the statement tool does is show the cleared transactions in a different list (in the lower half of the window) - In the order that you mark them as cleared. That means that you will see them in the same order as they appear on the statement.
Apart from that, all of the usual functions work the same way (the dialog will close when you mark it as balanced).
To access this, press the .
NOTE: The main window can be set up to automatically narrow down to a minimal width. This lets you put the finance app and a bank statement PDF side-by-side on a screen. You can set this up using the "Narrow Window" mode in settings - See the Settings page.
Cash accounts (what you have in your wallet) are a bit different to normal bank accounts, in that there is never an actual statement. You can still clear it though... If your cleared balance matches what you have in your wallet, then mark it as cleared.
Like cash, budgets are different to bank accounts in that you don't get a statement to balance against. You can still balance budgets though... Balancing the budget just means working through the transactions there and making sure everything that is there is supposed to be there. If it is all correct, clear the transactions and mark the budget as balanced - It all works the same as balancing accounts.