“Reconciliation is off by a few cents”
A gap of a few cents is a different problem from a gap of a whole transaction. Missing transactions produce round-looking differences; small ones point at how the numbers themselves were read.
Symptoms
The difference is under a dollar and does not match any single transaction It appears in some months and not others Re-entering one transaction by hand makes it disappear
What actually causes it
A truncated decimal place
Amounts written with more than two decimals — interest calculations especially — can be truncated rather than rounded on import. Each one loses a fraction of a cent, and the errors accumulate across a statement.
A thousands separator read as a decimal point
An importer that misreads 1.234 as one-point-two-three-four rather than one thousand two hundred and thirty-four produces a difference that looks small on a single line and enormous in aggregate.
Interest or fees posted outside the file
Monthly interest is sometimes posted with a date just outside the export range, leaving a small unexplained gap at the period boundary.
How to fix it
- Drop the file into the fixer below and look at the amount findings — values that are not plain numbers are listed with their line numbers.
- Check whether the difference matches the sum of fractional cents across the period, which points at truncation rather than a missing entry.
- Widen the date range by a few days at each end to catch interest posted at the boundary.
- Fix the amount formatting in the file rather than adjusting the register, so next month does not repeat it.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer refuses to normalise any amount whose decimal separator is ambiguous, which is precisely the case that creates small, repeating discrepancies. Free, no signup, no upload.
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