Every time you’ve added or imported some data into your ledger, note any errors coming up. If there’s a badge on the Errors section, click to go to http://localhost:5000/beancount/errors/. You may have some errors or discrepancies that you may want to fix either modifying transactions manually or changing code of your importer (if applicable).

Fava is your instrument to find and detail any of the errors (see Advanced Fava). It will take some time to learn where to go for what but eventually you will get comfortable with it.

Below I will provide the most common errors/discrepancies with likely reasons.

Balance failed 

      Balance failed for 'Assets:?:Cash': expected X != accumulated Y (YX too much)

Mentioned early, that probably means that you forgot to put (or have commented) a pad directive preceeding the balance check for the totals.

Unused Pad entry 

      Unused Pad entry

Also mentioned early, that means that the pad directive is not necessary since value of the account has not changed since the previous time. It would be nice to be able to ignore these warnings via settings but it’s not possible at the moment.

If any of the two errors above refer to the files under totals/, you can go to corresponding file in the Totals interface and click “Save”. This will comment/uncomment corresponding pad directives as necessary.

Negative expenses or positive income

Sometimes on the pages with the income/expenses graph you will see expenses that have negative values (that actually means it’s income) or income that has positive value (that actualy is typical for expense accounts).

Typically that would happen with Unattributed:* accounts and discrepancies in the Totals values. Maybe you missed some transactions or have typos? Use Fava to filter down to the shorter time period and investigate transactions and values more closely.

Look at the Detailed Expenses dashboard’s tables. They are designed to help you find potential mistakes or omissions in the data (use them together with Fava’s filters).

Also “Unattributed Expenses” in the Income and Expenses dashboard shows the dynamics of the expenses that were missed in imports and manual transactions. Ideally these should get closer to 0 as you track transactions more precisely. Or they just can stay low enough if you don’t care that much.