Dazzle keeps track of your business in 2 different ways.
a/. Using the actual data and transactions you create as you do business.
b/. Using the Transaction Journal.

Sometimes the totals do not agree. Why is that?

It's important to understand why there might be a difference, and the easiest way to explain it is by analogy ...

In your car you have an odometer. Every time you move the car, whether by one inch or one thousand miles, that odometer moves either a little or a lot. The odometer is physically linked to the wheels. If you drive in reverse, the odometer faithfully goes backwards. There is really no possibility of the odometer ever being "wrong".

Now let's say you need to keep a very accurate journal of miles driven, for tax reasons. So every time you drive the car you faithfully write in your journal how many miles you drive.

After six months you add up all the miles in your journal and it comes to 5,000 miles. You look at the odometer and it says 6,000 miles! What's wrong? Which one is correct? Should you call Ford or GM and ask them why the two figures are different?

The answer is: the odometer is correct. But you can't send an odometer to the tax Office, you have to send your journal. Why is your journal wrong?

Well --- remember the night you lent your car to your brother because his was being serviced? Probably that didn't go in the journal. What about the thirty or forty times you jumped in the car and drove to the corner store to get milk or beer? Ah yes! You kept saying it's only a few hundred yards, it's not important enough to write down. But it adds up.

What about the time you had to take your daughter to the emergency room? You were too upset to think about journals. And what about the three trips to the airport and back -- you kept saying you'd put them in the journal when you got time. Are you sure you did? What about when you took your car in for service? The mechanic said he test-drove it. Do you know how many miles he drove? You pick up your wife from work every day and you write in a fixed number of miles for that every weekend. Are you sure you never forgot? What about the six weeks when she had to work on Saturdays? That's one extra trip a week. Did you allow for that? What about all the times .... etcetera.

The point must be obvious. Although the odometer is physically linked to the wheels, your journal is not. When you try to add up all the individual trips separately it never comes to the same total as the odometer.

The transaction journal in DAZZLE is very similar. It tries to keep a journal of every dollar or pound in and out of the register. It tries to keep a journal of every ticket issued, every ticket redeemed, every payment made, every payment canceled, every item bought or sold, etc. It tries to, just as you try to record all the miles you drive. But unless you do everything absolutely by the book, it is very easy for its final totals to be inaccurate. Every time you delete something or change something or edit something, or reprice something, or lose something, or give the wrong change, or break something, or buy,sell,or swap something without putting it in the computer, or adjust, deviate, alter, change, "fix", or "correct" your records in some way, whether on the computer or off, you run the risk of making the final totals not add up correctly, and the difference gets carried forward to the next day, and just grows and grows.

So at the end of six months you run a report to total all your inventory or all your loans, and it does not agree with the total in the transaction journal. Which is correct? The report or the journal? The answer is usually the report. The report is like the odometer. it is physically counting what you really have, not calculating what you should have from a list of entries collected over a long period, which may be incomplete or inaccurate.

What is the point of having the transaction journal then? There are two answers to this. The first is - checks and balances. Let's say there is a dispute. A customer says he made a payment of $1000.00 but your computer records say it was only $100. A big difference! The first thing you can do is check your transaction journal, which is a totally separate record. If it says $1000.00, your customer was correct. So why does the main payment file show only a $100 payment? Well that's for you to figure out, but if it happens often enough you might want to suspect employee record tampering. Computer "glitches" don't normally create such nice round numbers. Occasionally a computer glitch might prevent a payment or a ticket from showing up at all. Once again, you can always check the transaction journal for final verification. Most employees don't even know about the journal, and they certainly can't get to it to change it. (You do have it secured, right?)

The second reason for a transaction journal is -- it is in "double-entry" format. Payments are broken down into their component parts for accounting purposes, and all the parts must add up to zero. If they don't then something is wrong or "out of balance". This makes it ideal for use for accounting purposes, which is why the transaction journal is used to export to.Quickbooks, etc. It's like your car Journal. You can't send an odometer to the tax office. You have to send them a list in a format they understand.

But whenever you have two essentially disconnected systems running independently, if you care about accuracy, you must reconcile them frequently. Your Dazzle software produces two lists of totals every day, one from the transaction journal and the other from the data-files (the "odometer"). If you want to maintain an accurate accounting pcture, you really should reconcile them against each other every day, and hopefully understand what actions caused the differences, and make any necessary corrections. If you wait six months you are likely to find very great differences. Then you will probably want to call Dazzle Support in a panic and say "Why don't my books balance?" Of course we have no idea. You might as well ask us why your car odometer is different from your mileage journal. How could we know? Unfortunately there is not much you can do at this six-month late stage.

How do you make "corrections"?. Whether it is a few dollars once a week for reasons you understand, or a few thousand dollars for reasons you don't understand because you waited too long to reconcile... What you have to do is synchronize the two sets of figures, and hopefully keep a closer eye on them from now on. It's just like when you don't reconcile your checking account for six months and one day you look at the latest bank statement and you see it says your balance is $500 less than you thought. The bank might have made an error, but it would be a whole lot easier to spot such errors if you checked it every month instead of every six months. Now you will have to check and cross-check thousands of transactions and charges and checks, etc. Probably if you are like most people you can't be bothered, and you will just re-synchronize your check-register to agree with what the bank says, and continue on from there.

That's what you do with Dazzle if you can't find the cause of the difference, or if you can't be bothered. The easiest way to re-synchronise is to go to OFFICE-->CONFIGURATION-->ACCOUNTING-->STARTING BALANCES. You will see a screen showing you the major closing balances for yesterday (Loans, Inventory, etc) Some of them may be zero because you don't use that area of Dazzle. For instance if you don't do check-cashing, then the check depository balance will be zero.

Put a checkmark in those boxes where zero is correct and OK. With the other balances, to synchronise them with the counted data totals, click on CALCULATE. Dazzle will re-count the database totals just to be sure and plug the "corrected" amount into your screen... just like you would probably do with your checkbook. Click SAVE to save.

We do urge you do compare the totals daily, and stay on top of any disparities that occur. This is just a cost of having a separate double-entry journal. If you are unwilling to do this we quite understand, it is your decision to make, but we would recommend you simply turn off your transaction journal permanently in OFFICE-->CONFIGURATION-->MASTER CONFIGURATION-->ACCOUNTING, and click on STANDARD.