"Opening Balance" transaction category?

ejs · July 4

I see that there is a transaction category called "Opening Balance" which I never noticed before. Is this a new category?

I normally review all of my transactions and mark them as reviewed once complete. When I just searched my transaction history for transactions that have not been marked as reviewed, I see that I have a few transactions from old closed accounts that are marked as not reviewed and that are categorized as Opening Balance. These transactions never showed up before when I ran searches for non-reviewed transactions. I'm trying to understand what happened.

SRC54 · July 4

I think it's always been there along with Balance Adjustment. Both are ignored in Spending Plan & Reports by default.

I have used the Opening Balance for all my accounts so that I can total transactions to check for missing transactions in connected accounts. The total should match your downloaded balance.

ejs · July 5

If that's the case I'm wondering why these transactions from months ago (one from November and a couple from January) are suddenly showing up as "not reviewed." They are from closed accounts, so it can't be that they were recently imported for some reason. And none of them have the "Appears on your bank statement as…" description at the top of the transaction detail box, which makes it seem like they were manually created.

SRC54 · July 5

Ah. Who knows? Most likely created when you created the account. Neither of these entries would be from your bank. Simplifi would create Opening Balance from information you enter when you create the manual account.

Balance Adjustment should normally only be needed for manual accounts as well since Connected Accounts should always show the correct balance.

ejs · July 5

These transactions only appeared as "not reviewed" within the past few days (I know because I search for non-reviewed transactions almost daily). The accounts they are in were not manual accounts, they were connected accounts, but they are now closed accounts. They were closed recently. Maybe somehow marking the accounts as closed caused these Opening Balance transactions to appear? Seems like it might be a bug.

DryHeat · July 5

@ejs

"Maybe somehow marking the accounts as closed caused these Opening Balance transactions to appear?"

If you select all the transactions, including the Opening Balance, does the total equal zero? I ask because it would make some kind of sense for Simplifi to add the Opening Balance to zero out the account. Otherwise I don't know why they would do it.

SRC54 · July 5

I have these glitches appear too when things get changed or revert, and I just think it is part and parcel of what happens when you get frequent updates to the software. Is it that when you marked it reviewed, it turned green, but didn't really get changed in the database, etc. I just do it again and move on.

ejs · July 5

@DryHeat - no, in fact, in one of the accounts, it's the opposite — without the Opening Balance transaction, all of the transactions add up to zero, but including the Opening Balance transaction throws it off by the amount of that transaction (in the other accounts where this is happening, the balance is close to adding up to zero but is off by a little bit, but then including the Opening Balance transactions throws it off by even more).

@SRC54 - the problem is that things like this make me lose confidence that I can rely on the software in general. I make sure to review every single transaction, and regularly search for non-reviewed transactions, so the fact that these old transactions suddenly appeared as non-reviewed means that something changed or went wrong — either they are new transactions that somehow got retroactively created, or they got marked as non-reviewed when then were previously reviewed, etc.

"Opening Balance" transaction category?

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