Why are my account balance and bucket balance totals different?

Your total of all your spending account balances (excluding loans and credit cards) should equal the total of all your income and expense buckets. If not, you could have an improperly assigned bucket on a transfer.

Let's say you have $1000 in your checking account and you allocate that to five different buckets, each getting $200. Now you spend all the money in four of the buckets by assigning withdrawal transactions to each and your bucket balance is down to $200 (the one unspent bucket) and your account balance is also $200. All is good.

Now you decide that the remaining $200 in your checking account should be used to pay down your credit card debt so you drag your checking account to your credit card account and create a $200 transfer. This drops your account balance to zero but you still show $200 in your Debt Repayment bucket.

What you didn't do was to drag the newly created $200 withdrawal transaction to this Debt Repayment bucket so the account and bucket balances are out of sync. Once you assign a bucket to this withdrawal, everything is back to normal.

The flip side of this problem would be to mistakenly assign BOTH sides of the transfer to a bucket (or buckets) causing them to cancel each other out (a positive $200 and a negative $200) leaving you with an unchanged bucket balance total but still a lower account balance.

Basically, you have to assign buckets to all your transactions except for some that are involved in transfers.

One scenario that you wouldn't assign any buckets would be an ATM withdrawal from your checking account. You would simply create the transaction in your checking account and click the "Cash only" option on that transaction. This creates a transfer from checking to your cash account.

Since this transfer of funds is between two accounts that you use for spending (basically the same pool of funds), you don't need to assign any buckets.

Additionally, if you have hidden buckets, you may have cash flow in those that could affect your bucket balance. Use the action button below the Buckets List to Show Hidden Buckets and check those for transactions or money flows.