Available Balance

Hi there. :heart_eyes: Snoop so far, but just an idea.

This doesn’t apply to Monzo etc. But for legacy banks it’s useful to show an available balance rather than live balance would be more useful for me to see in the summary.

Hi @DaveShaw.

Balances are surprisingly difficult to get right! Basically each bank seems to have its own rules and treatments about what they show in their own mobile app or online banking service. Some banks present multiple balances or have complicated rules about which transactions they apply or not.

That’s before you even bring in credit lines and overdraft amounts :exploding_head:

What we’ve decided to do so far is present what the bank tell us is the ‘confirmed’ (also known as ‘booked’) balance of an account but also then list any pending transactions that may not have been applied yet. These pending items can often change before they become confirmed payments.

I know that sometimes this is different to how certain banks present things. Barclays for example show their main balance with Pending items already applied. Others like HSBC do it the way I’ve outlined.

Longer term we want to extend this out to potentially show a different balance treatment for each bank or maybe even have more than one balance. Also showing any credit line/overdraft that’s available as well.

We will be testing some ideas on this in the months ahead, but for now we will just have the one confirmed balance.

Hope that makes sense?