Totals that admit what's missing

The quiet error in most money figures

Every reseller who has kept a spreadsheet has met this problem, even if they never noticed it. A row is missing an amount (the tax on a mall sale you haven’t seen the statement for, say), and the cell is blank. The sum at the bottom of the column treats that blank as zero, and produces a tidy number.

The number looks finished. It isn’t. And because it looks finished, nobody goes back to check.

Sellers Almanac is built on one rule here: unknown is not zero. A missing amount is a fact about your records, and the totals say so.

What you see instead

When a total depends on an amount that isn’t recorded, three things happen:

1. The figure says “at least”. What’s shown is the sum of everything that is known. The real figure can’t be lower than that, so “at least” is the honest way to state it.
2. It is marked Incomplete. You can tell at a glance which numbers are whole and which aren’t.
3. It tells you why. Not just “something’s missing”, but what and how many. For example, that 1 sale isn’t counted because its tax amount isn’t recorded.

That last part matters most. A warning without a reason teaches you to ignore warnings. A reason tells you exactly which record to finish.

Why “at least” is the right word

Consider an ordinary Saturday. You sold four things: two at a yard sale for cash, one through a Facebook Marketplace pickup, and one at the antique mall, where the tax will only show up on the mall’s statement. Three sales are fully recorded. The fourth has the amount the customer paid but no tax amount yet.

Your sales figure for the day can’t honestly be stated to the dollar, because part of what the customer paid at the mall may have been tax rather than sales. What Sellers Almanac can say truthfully is the figure for the three complete sales, that the real figure is at least that, and which sale is outstanding.

That’s less satisfying than a single confident number. It is also correct, and when the statement arrives, it takes a few seconds to make it whole.

Finishing it

Incomplete records wait in Needs attention, one list for everything left undone. Open the record, add the missing amount, and once that change is backed up, the totals that depended on it count it. The “at least” disappears, and so does the Incomplete mark.

The same rule applies when you change your mind about a sale. If you correct or void a sale, the totals follow the record rather than the first version of it.

What it doesn’t do

Honest totals don’t estimate, average or fill in. Sellers Almanac will not guess a tax amount from a percentage, and it will not invent a figure to make a total look complete. It shows what you’ve recorded and is plain about what you haven’t.

It also doesn’t claim to know more than the records. Every figure on Home and in Money is a total of what is recorded, not a verdict on the whole business. If something never made it into the app, no total can account for it.

Where it stands

Honest totals are in founder testing on iPhone, in a test build the founders use. Sellers Almanac isn’t available to download yet. See the roadmap for what’s built and what’s planned.