Open a card and you'll see two figures side by side:
balance owed − reserve held = the gap
- Balance owed — what the bank says you owe.
- Reserve held — cash you've actually set aside to pay it.
- The gap — the part you haven't funded yet.
A gap is not an error. It's the honest amount of card debt with no money behind it. A card you're carrying a balance on should show one.
What makes up the gap
Click What's unfunded on the card. It splits into two buckets, and together they reconcile to the gap exactly.
Uncategorized charges Transactions with no category yet. These are excluded from the funded/unfunded math entirely — guessing would corrupt the arithmetic. Each has a Categorize link that takes you straight to it. Categorize them first; the picture usually changes.
Unfunded charges Real, categorized charges your budget didn't cover, plus any starting debt from when you added the card. Each row shows the payee, date, amount, and its category, with a one-click Fund it.
Funding it
One charge at a time — click Fund it next to a row. That assigns the needed amount to the charge's spending category from Ready to Assign, which immediately funds the charge and moves the money into the card's payment category. The gap drops by that amount.
All at once — assign directly to the card's payment category on the Budget screen. This raises the earmark without attributing it to any particular charge. Good for paying down an old balance where per-charge attribution isn't meaningful.
Either way you need money in Ready to Assign. If you don't have it, move it from another category first — see assign and move money.
Starting debt
If you had a balance when you added the card, that's recorded as starting debt. It raises what you owe but not what you've set aside, so it shows up in the gap immediately.
That's correct: the debt is real and you haven't funded it. Closing it means budgeting real money toward the card over time — which is what the debt payoff plan is for.
Do I have to close it?
No. There are two reasonable positions:
Pay in full every month. Keep the gap at $0.00. Every charge is funded as you make it, and the reserve always covers the statement. This is the goal state.
Carrying a balance. Fund new spending as it happens so the debt stops growing, and pay the old balance down deliberately through the debt planner. A stable gap that shrinks monthly is progress.
What you want to avoid is a gap that grows without you noticing — that's spending beyond your budget on credit.
If the numbers don't reconcile
The card ledger checks itself. If the gap doesn't equal the unfunded charges plus uncategorized total, a reconciliation warning appears on the card.
Most common causes:
- A missing transaction. The bank balance includes something your register doesn't. Reconcile the account — see reconciling an account.
- A duplicate. Usually from importing a file that overlapped a previous import.
- A wrong account type. The card must be typed credit card for the reserve model to apply.
If it still doesn't add up, contact support with the card name and the three figures.
Overfunded cards
If the reserve is larger than what you owe, you've set aside more than you need — often after paying a card down while still funding new charges.
Open the card and use Release to send the excess back to Ready to Assign, where you can put it to work.