When two numbers don't tally

Two figures that should agree, don’t.

Before you go looking for a missing transaction — and that is where most of an afternoon goes — find your symptom below. Each page opens with a check you can run on the screen in front of you, in about thirty seconds, and tells you which of the two figures is the one that moved.

Most of the time neither is broken. One of them is simply older than the other, and the fix is to know which.

Find your symptom

• The aging still shows an invoice that’s already paid — you received the money, the invoice itself says zero, and the report still lists it as outstanding.
• Everything is matched to zero and the reconciliation still won’t tally — or a month you finished weeks ago has quietly drifted open again.
• The Trial Balance doesn’t agree with the ledger — the account you drilled into adds up to something else, an account is missing altogether, or the whole report comes back empty.
• The order still shows a quantity outstanding after I invoiced it all — and it is holding stock back from customers who could have had it.
• The margin report and the profit and loss don’t agree — or last quarter’s gross profit has moved since the last time you looked at it.

If none of them is yours: the check that works on any figure

It takes about thirty seconds and it needs no knowledge of how the platform works.

1. Check the two screens are asking the same question first. A different company, a different branch, a different Set of Books, a date range that includes the end date on one side and excludes it on the other. Half of all “not tally” cases end here.
2. Drill in and add it up. Open the detail behind the figure — the journal lines behind the account, the documents behind the customer’s balance, the cashbook lines behind the reconciliation — and total them.
3. Read the result. If the detail agrees with the headline, the headline is current. If the detail is bigger than the headline, the headline is an older figure that was worked out before those extra rows existed. That tells you which side moved without knowing anything about why.

Then work out what put the extra rows there — nearly always something dated backwards: a supplier invoice that arrived late, a receipt keyed on the 4th and dated the 28th, a void, a corrected transaction date.

Why it works this way

Some figures BigLedger works out the moment you open the screen. Others were worked out once, written down, and are only redone on purpose. Neither is more correct than the other — they answer different questions, and an accountant needs both.

Which figures BigLedger stores, and which it works out fresh is the whole picture: the five places in the platform that store an answer instead of working it out again, when each one was taken, what moves it, and why the obvious alternative would be worse.

Related documentation

• Financial Report applet — Month End Processing, the snapshots, and the Error Checking screens that find a document which never posted at all.
• Financial Accounting module — month-end in the order the system expects, and where each balance in the module comes from.