Actual vs Available Balances: What’s the Difference? | Astra (2024)

FAQs

Actual vs Available Balances: What’s the Difference? | Astra? ›

Actual - The amount of funds showing in your account without considering incoming or outgoing funds that might be in transit. Available - The funds that are not already allocated to an expense, have settled into your account and can be spent.

Your actual balance, or sometimes just called balance, is the total of all the transactions on your account including any pending transactions. Available balance is what is available for you to use out of this actual balance – typically this is your actual balance minus any pending transactions.

You may notice a difference between your balance and your available balance. That's because your available balance includes some pending transactions. These could be things you've bought with your debit card that haven't yet been processed.

Key takeaways. The current balance of your bank account is the total amount of money in the account, while the available balance is the amount you can actually access and use.

In a checking account, the available balance is the amount of money that the account holder can withdraw immediately. The current balance, by contrast, includes any pending transactions that have not yet been cleared. The bank will honor any withdrawal or payment you make up to the available balance amount.

Your current balance reflects the amount of money in your bank account at any given moment. Your available balance is the amount of money you have to spend, including any pending payments and deposits. The key difference is that your pending purchases do not appear in the current balance.

Your current balance is negative because you've made purchases that haven't posted yet but have been authorized. In order to fix it, you would have to deposit money (which you may have to wait to clear), or transfer it from another account.

This extra available amount (which is your overdraft limit) means that you are borrowing money from the bank. Anytime you borrow money, you must pay interest on what you borrow. This also applies to overdraft protection, as well as when you overdraw your bank account unintentionally.

The primary difference between the current balance and available credit is that the current balance reflects the amount you currently owe, while the available credit represents how much credit you have left to use on your card.

Your available balance is the total amount of money that you have immediately accessible from your account. Your available balance typically reflects items that have been paid from your account, as well as certain same-day transactions (such as debit card purchases and direct deposits) that are pending.

What is the difference between actual balance and clear balance? ›

Total balance is just the current amount in your bank account (This does not include cheque deposits or withdrawals or any other kind of transactions which is still in the process of clearing). Whereas clear balance is the amount in your bank account after taking in to account every pending transactions.

Actual balance (or ledger balance) is the amount of money that is actually in your account at any given time. It reflects transactions posted to your account, but not transactions that are pending. While it may seem that the actual balance is the current funds that you can spend, this is not always the case.

Your current balance is the total of all the posted transactions as of the previous business day. Your available credit is figured by subtracting your current balance (or amount already used) from your credit limit and adding any outstanding charges that have not posted yet.

Actual - The amount of funds showing in your account without considering incoming or outgoing funds that might be in transit. Available - The funds that are not already allocated to an expense, have settled into your account and can be spent.

Your available balance is the total amount of money in your account that you can use for purchases and withdrawals, as it excludes pending transactions and check holds from your account balance. However, the available balance will not show checks that haven't been cashed or deposits which haven't posted.

SBA calculates arrears as the difference between the scheduled loan balance and the actual loan balance. For example, if a loan has a scheduled loan balance of $100,000 and an actual loan balance of $90,000, the arrears would be $10,000. SBA is a simple and straightforward method of calculating arrears.

'Balance' is the amount of money in your account before all pending transactions have been processed. 'Available' is the amount that you can spend today, and is a more accurate reflection of how much you can spend at that time.

Your present account balance (sometimes called the current balance) shows how much money is currently in your bank account—but it doesn't consider pending transactions, which can take up to three business days to clear. That means your present balance will probably run higher than your available balance.