ShowMeTheMoney

Features

Reconcile your budget with your bank statements

ShowMeTheMoney, the envelope budgeting app, checks every account against your bank's statements until they agree to the cent, the way a bookkeeper would. Most of the time it happens on its own when you import a statement.

What reconciling is, and why it matters

Reconciling means checking an account, statement by statement, against what your bank actually shows. Your starting balance plus the transactions on the statement must come to the statement's ending balance. When they don't, something is wrong: a transaction missing, recorded twice, or for the wrong amount, or a bank fee nobody wrote down. Finding it while the statement is in front of you is easy; finding it months later is not.

A budget built on balances that have been checked is one you can trust: the money in your envelopes is money that really exists.

Automatically, when you import a statement

A statement is the one document that says what an account should hold, so accepting its transactions also reconciles them against it. If what you accepted comes to the statement's closing balance, the account is reconciled there and then. If it doesn't, you're told by how much and offered the reconciliation screen with the statement's dates and balances already filled in. Either way the import is finished.

  • A reconciliation made this way is marked Automatic in the account's history, so it's never mistaken for checking you did by hand.
  • A statement that was already reconciled isn't reconciled twice.
  • Prefer to do it yourself every time? Turn off Reconcile automatically after a statement import in Settings.

See how PDF statement import reads the statement in the first place.

By hand, line by line

  1. Start a reconciliation from the account's Reconciliation page with the statement's dates and its ending balance. The starting balance is the previous reconciliation's ending balance when the statements follow on from each other.
  2. Tick off each transaction that appears on the statement. A summary keeps the cleared balance and the difference up to date as you go.
  3. Add what's missing without leaving the page: a fee or interest the statement shows that you hadn't recorded.
  4. Finish once the difference reads exactly $0.00. The arithmetic is done again by the app itself when you finish, so a reconciliation can't be completed while anything is out.
A credit card reconciliation: six September transactions ticked as cleared, an ending balance of -$240.22 and a difference of $0.00.
A card statement reconciled: every transaction ticked, the difference at $0.00.

Locked once it balances

Every transaction a reconciliation covers is locked, so an accidental edit can't quietly undo the checking: last month stays last month. A mistake can still be put right on purpose. Deleting a reconciliation from the history returns its transactions to cleared (it never deletes them), and a single transaction can be unlocked on its own.

Never miss a statement

  • Statement reminders: give an account its statement day and you're reminded when the statement is due.
  • A mark in the account list shows each account whose latest statement hasn't been reconciled yet.
  • Gaps are shown: skip a period and the history shows a missing statement, with one click to fill it.

Try it on your own accounts

Every feature, free for 30 days, no card needed.

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