Tips for finding discrepancies

If you’ve tried to reconcile your accounts in YNAB and given up because you couldn’t find the problem, you might had had YNAB do a reconciliation balance adjustment. That’s fine. But if the discrepancy is large (say, $100 or more) I think it’s worth looking a little harder before doing an automatic adjustment.

Last week I blogged about why it’s important to reconcile. This week, I want to share a few tips for finding the problem so you can enjoy that Eureka! moment when you find the discrepancy and can reconcile.

• Add up the digits of the number you’re off. (If you’re off by $360.00, for example, you’d add those numbers and get 9.) If the sum is divisible by 9, as in this example, then the problem might be a transposition of numbers. That’s a clue to go through and compare your bank/credit card statement line by line with your YNAB numbers. That kind of error happens fairly easily when you’re manually entering numbers.
• Check for duplicates. Sort the transactions by Payee and look for the same Payee within a few days of one another. Check those transactions against your bank/credit card to see if they’re duplicates. Often restaurant transactions come in as pending before the tip and sometimes YNAB doesn’t match them, particularly if you categorize and click Enter Now on those pre-tip transactions.
• Make sure you’re comparing apples with apples. You want to match your cleared YNAB balance with your cleared bank balance. If you have YNAB transactions that haven’t cleared and it’s been more than a few days, look to see if an identical transaction has cleared. (Search by Payee or Amount.) If you find one, just delete the uncleared transaction.
• Divide the discrepancy by two. If you accidentally entered a transaction in wrong the inflow/outflow column, the discrepancy would be twice that amount. So do a search on the amount that’s half the discrepancy and you may luck out.
• Check your starting balance in YNAB. If you’re relatively new to YNAB, your starting balance might be the problem. Look for a transaction that matches the amount you’re off and see if it came in right after you started YNAB. If that’s the case, just change your starting balance adding or subtracting the amount of that transaction, depending on whether it’s a withdrawal or deposit.
• Look at reconciliation balance adjustments. If you’ve made balance adjustments in the past, enter “adjustment” in the search box to find all your past adjustment. Compare the amounts of the adjustment(s) with your discrepancy. Maybe they’re the culprit.
• Look at reconciled transactions. If all the transactions since you last reconciled match up, consider that you might have reconciled erroneously in the past. In that case, it might be easiest to print out your statements, working your way backward in time, and confirm each and every transaction until you find the problem.

I hope those tips give you a starting place for finding the discrepancy. Remember that you may have more than one problematic transaction so don’t just look for transactions in the amount you’re off (though that’s a good starting point). More often than not, in my experience, it’s several transactions that add up to the problematic discrepancy.

Once you’ve reconciled, do it frequently so you don’t have to go through this process again! I do it every time I’m in YNAB, which is every day. That makes reconciliation easy as pie.