The gap that always happens
You look at your Freelance Budget dashboard: treasury €12,480.
You open your banking app: €12,320.
€160 gap. Where does it come from?
Possible answers:
- A bank transaction you haven't imported yet
- An expense you entered in the app but the bank hasn't debited yet (different posting date)
- A personal movement on the pro account you haven't classified
- A rounding error on a currency conversion
- A bank fee you didn't track
Without a dedicated tool, you go back to Excel and recompute. With calibration, you press a button.
How calibration works
The app keeps a balanceOffset field per entity. At startup, the offset is zero — the app computes cash purely from its own flows (paid invoices - settled expenses + initial balance).
When you spot a gap:
- You indicate the actual bank balance for today
- The app computes the gap between what it thought and reality
- That gap becomes the
balanceOffset— applied permanently to all treasury views
Concretely: if the app says €12,480 but your bank says €12,320, you calibrate to €12,320. From that moment, the app shows the right numbers everywhere — dashboard, projections, health score, runway.
When to calibrate (and when not)
Calibrate:
- Before first use (initial balance)
- Start of the month when you do your bookkeeping
- When the gap exceeds €50 unexplained
- After a special accounting event (closing, audit, bank change)
Don't calibrate:
- Every day — it's a readjustment tool, not a daily workflow
- When the gap is explainable (transaction not imported — import it instead)
- On a whim — understand the gap first
The classic trap: over-calibrating
Common beginner mistake: see a gap, calibrate immediately. After 3 months, you've calibrated 12 times and each calibration absorbs a different reason. You no longer understand anything about your cash.
Better: before each calibration, take 2 minutes to understand where the gap comes from. Often it's a transaction to import, a forgotten expense, or a personal wire to exclude. Calibrate only when you can't explain it.
Traceability — that's crucial
Every calibration is logged: date, amount before, amount after, gap absorbed, optional reason.
Why does it matter?
- Audit trail: your accountant must be able to reconstruct why you have a balance different from the sum of your transactions
- Error detection: if you see multiple same-sign calibrations in a row, there's a systemic problem (a bank charging hidden fees, for example)
- Personal peace of mind: reviewing the calibration history is reviewing your "this doesn't add up" moments. After 6 months, you know where your blind spots are.
The real magic: the projection engine absorbs it
Once calibrated, the entire treasury projection engine restarts on the right basis. The 12-month projection recomputes. The health score recomputes. The runway recomputes.
It's not just a sidenote saying "there's a €160 discrepancy". It's a rewriting of your treasury truth that propagates to every view.
Why this feature is rare
Most SaaS tools keep cash purely computed from their own flows. If reality differs, it's on you to find the error in their tool.
Freelance Budget admits the bank reality is the truth, not the app's computation. The balanceOffset is the honest mechanism to acknowledge that and keep projecting accurately.
It's typically the feature whose value you only realize after 6 months of use — when you realize you haven't had that "but how much do I REALLY have?" anxiety in months.