Fund balances and opening balances
How Psalmly computes each fund's real balance — opening balance plus everything given minus what you've spent — why setting opening balances on day one matters, the as-of date, the Unassigned bucket, and why a negative balance isn't an error.
The Fund balances card on your Finances page shows what each fund actually has on hand — not just what's moved through Psalmly, but a real balance you can read out at a board meeting. The math is one line, shown right on each row:
opening balance + everything given − what you've spent = balance
"Everything given" counts all giving to that fund — online gifts and any cash and checks you've recorded — and "spent" counts the expenses you've tagged to it. Both update the moment something is recorded.
Why opening balances matter
Here's the day-one problem: say your building fund has $8,000 sitting in the bank. If Psalmly only counted what's logged after you adopted Finances, the fund would show $0 plus whatever's happened since — which reads as broken, because it is, honestly, wrong.
Set opening balances fixes that. Click the button on the Fund balances card, pick the date your figures are true as of, and enter each fund's starting amount from your bank or your old spreadsheet. From the day after that, giving and expenses adjust the balances automatically — the one-time figure anchors everything to reality. Opening balances have to be zero or a positive amount; if a fund was already overdrawn on day one, leave it at 0 and let the entries you log carry the deficit.
It's worth doing in your first sitting with Finances. Until you do, treat the balances as "logged since we started" rather than money on hand.
The as-of date
The Balances as of date does one simple thing: giving and expenses recorded after that date count toward the balance, and the date itself — along with everything before it — is treated as already inside the opening figure. So enter the balance as it stood at the end of that day: if you set balances as of June 1, that morning's offering is already in the number you typed, and anything from June 2 onward is added on top.
You can come back and adjust opening balances later without touching anything you've logged — the entries stay exactly as they are; only the anchor moves.
The Unassigned / general bucket
Not every dollar belongs to a named fund, and that's fine. Expenses you don't tag to a fund land in Unassigned / general, which gets its own row on the card.
Giving always names a fund — if a giver doesn't pick one, it goes to your default fund ("Tithes & offerings" unless you renamed it). So if most of your church's money is simply "the general budget," tag its expenses to that same default fund and the two sides will line up. Leaving them in Unassigned instead would show that row sinking further below zero every month while the giving piles up somewhere else.
Negative balances are normal
A fund can legitimately dip below zero — you spent from the building fund ahead of a pledge drive, or general expenses ran ahead of giving this month. Psalmly shows a negative balance plainly, without alarm colors or warnings, because for a small church it's a season, not an emergency. If a number genuinely surprises you, open the expense ledger: the fund filter narrows it to a named fund, and the Fund column on each row shows which spending is sitting in Unassigned. See Tracking expenses.
Balances on the page vs. the report
The card on your Finances page always shows balances as of today. The board report shows them as of the end of the reporting period you chose — so a report for June shows where each fund stood on June 30, even if you pull it in mid-July. Same math, different "as of". See The board report and exports.