Every balance in HiBill is derived from visible transactions, so an unexpected number always has a findable cause. Work down this list.
1. Is there a second currency?
The most common one. Balances are tracked per currency, so you may be looking at one of two figures.
Check for another amount below the one you are reading. €40 and £15 are two separate balances and never combine into one number. See working with multiple currencies.
2. Look for a Simplification entry
If you see a transaction labelled Simplification that you did not create, a debt loop was collapsed — you owed Marco, Marco owed Aya, Aya owed you, and part of that circle cancelled.
Your real position is unchanged; there are just fewer payments needed. See how debt simplification works.
3. Unclaimed shares on an open split
On an open split, anything nobody claims stays with whoever paid.
If people have not claimed yet, the balance is smaller than the full bill suggests. Open the transaction and see what has actually been claimed.
4. Did someone edit or delete a transaction?
Edits and deletions recalculate balances, and both appear in your Activity feed.
If a balance changed and you do not know why, Activity is the place to look — it is a chronological record of everything that happened. See editing and deleting transactions.
5. Were you a payer as well as a participant?
Paying for something you also share does not put the whole amount on other people. Pay €96 for a dinner where your own share is €24, and you are owed €72, not €96.
Likewise, if you paid exactly your own share, nothing is owed either way and the transaction correctly moves nothing.
6. Two entries for the same person
Easy to do: "Marco" and "Marco B" are two separate people with two separate balances, so half the history sits under each.
Check People for near-duplicates. If one is a placeholder and the other is a real account, merge them to combine the history.
7. Multiple payers
If a bill had more than one payer, each payer's contribution is tracked separately. Someone who put in less than their share still owes the difference — the split is worked out independently of who paid.
Still not right?
Open the person and read the two-person ledger from the top. Every transaction that affected the balance is there, in order.
If the entries are all correct and the total still is not, that is a bug and we want to know — send us the details and we will look. Nothing in HiBill adjusts a balance without leaving a visible entry, so a discrepancy with no matching transaction is never expected behaviour.