Running balances are unreliable

[avee87]

Support guidelines

• I'm smart and I read the support guidelines

I've found a bug and checked that ...

• ... the documentation does not mention anything about my problem
• ... there are no open or closed issues that are related to my problem
• ... it's definitely a Firefly III issue, not me

Description

I have a fairly long history of transactions on a bunch of accounts and at this point almost all running balances are wrong and cannot be relied on. That being said, chart on top of account view always shows correct values.

When looking at transaction history, it's not always clear when it "breaks" but apparently some transactions seem to contribute wildly incorrectly to running balances.

Here is one instance where I spotted the inconsistency "being born":

Note that transfer seems to "reset" the running total - i.e., instead of adding to the running total it just sets it to the transfer amount.

Debug information

Debug information generated at 2026-03-06 17:14:56 for Firefly III version v6.5.3.

System information
Item	Value
Firefly III	v6.5.3
Build time	2026-03-04 07:49:27 Europe/Amsterdam (1772606967)
PHP version	8.5.3 (64bits) / fpm-fcgi / Linux x86_64
BCscale	12
Error reporting	Display: Off, reporting: ALL errors
Max upload	104857600 (100 MB)
Database drivers	*mysql*, pgsql, sqlite,

Firefly III information
Item	Value
Timezone	Europe/London + Europe/London
App environment	local, debug: false
Layout	v1
Logging	notice, stack / (empty)
Cache driver, session driver	file, file
Default language and locale	en_GB + equal
Trusted proxies	**
Login provider & user guard	eloquent / remote_user_guard
Login headers	Remote-Email +
Stateful domains
Last cron job	2026-03-06 00:00:00 (17 hours ago)
Mailer	smtp
Exchange rates	Enabled, downloads disabled
RB-column	Enabled

User-specific information
Item	Value
User	#1 of 2
User flags	💳 🐷 🔧
Primary currency	GBP
Convert to primary currency?	Disabled
Session start	2026-03-01 00:00:00
Session end	2026-03-31 23:59:59
View range	1M
User language	en_GB
User locale	en_GB
Locale(s) supported	en_GB.utf8: ✅ en_GB.UTF-8: ✅
User agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/144.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce

Unfportunately, I wasn't able to reproduce this issue in a controlled and reproducible manner.

Additional info

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi there!

This is an automated reply. Share and enjoy

Thank you for including debug information. You triggered an automated reply, because it looks like you're not running Firefly III version v6.5.4 or version v2.2.0 of the data importer.

Please make sure to upgrade to the latest version of Firefly III (or the data importer) first. This may already solve your issue.

If you are running the latest version, and this message is wrong, my apologies for the intrusion.

[avee87]

Note that I first spotted this issue quite some time ago so I cannot tell which Firefly version first introduced the bug. It may have been there ever since running totals were first implemented.

[avee87]

Another example from the same account - just a regular expense wildly changes the running total:

Interestingly enough, I suspect this green entry may actually match the reality unlike others.

I wish there was a way to help debug this without sharing my actual financial data.

[JC5]

Hey, thanks for opening an issue.

I'm aware of the issue, I'm opening and closing tickets as I find the cause of particular causes.

If you have something I can replicate, I would be much obliged.

Cheers,
James

[JC5]

https://docs.firefly-iii.org/references/faq/firefly-iii/finances/#the-running-balance-column-isnt-correct

[avee87]

Fantastic! Looks like after recalculation my balances are correct. Hopefully I won't need to run it too often!