Consistency Check Error immediately after importing OFX file.

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1

I’ve been getting the dreaded error “Sum of splits in transaction ‘T000000000000013839’ posted on 2/17/2026 is not zero.” immediately after importing an OFX file from my financial institution.

The thing is that these are not split transactions. They are simply new payees for which I have not assigned a category yet. Will it be possible to delay the consistency check until after I have had a chance to clear the transactions and apply categories to them?

I am using 5.2.2 on OpenSuSE Leap 16.0.

2

A balanced transaction with an amount unequal to zero always has at least two splits. One split references your (e.g. checking) account, the other one the category. That is the secret of the double-entry booking system. The split transaction you refer to has at least three splits.

You mention that you have not assigned a category yet: that means you have a transaction with one split and an amount not equal to zero. Therefore the sum of all splits is not zero which causes it to be reported.

The consistency check is only executed upon a save operation. Seems that you have some sort of auto save enabled when this happens immediately. Could that be the case? Simply make the timeout longer or turn it off completely and you get what you are looking for.

3

The misunderstanding of Luis_Marengo comes from the wording used in the software. I also had misunderstood it a long time until i got it…

  1. a split is one side of a transaction in a double-entry booking system
  • split 1: 100 € categorized on “car insurance” are one split
  • split 2: this amount is also booked to the bank account the money came from
  1. a split is a fragment of a transaction amount allocated on several categories.
  • one transaction of 100 € sent to my brother will be allocated on several splits:
    • split 1: 20 € food
    • split 2: 70 € fuel expenses
    • split 3: 10 € toll
      and of course, these 3 splits have their own “other” split on the bank account side the money comes from.

So unfortunately the same word split has two distinct uses: the first one names the double-entry bookkeeping side, the other one is the fragmentation of a paid amount in several other amounts for finer categorization purposes.

I guess I am not the first one who laments about this…
If it is possible to improve the wording, I would suggest this:

  • keep “split” for the double-entry bookkeeping thing
  • use “allocation” or “portion” for the fragmentation of 100 € into 20 + 70 + 10.
4

I do have auto-save set for every 5 minutes. I just turned it off.

Thanks for the tip and for the explanation. When I thought of split transactions, I thought of transactions where the amount on a single ledger line is split into two or more categories.