Actual Balance
Everything collected. The whole amount that has arrived, before anything is set aside or owed onward.
The ledger
Every amount, written twice.
The moment you hold money for other people, the question stops being how much you have and becomes whose it is. A wallet ledger answers that question for every amount, on demand, without anyone reconstructing it from receipts.
Every movement is recorded twice and checked automatically. If the two sides disagree, the difference is raised rather than absorbed.
A merchant dashboard showing four balances and a list of recent wallet movements.
What a ledger is
A record, not a running total.
A balance is a number. A ledger is the set of movements that number came from, held so that the number can always be rebuilt from them.
Double-entry bookkeeping is the industry term for it, and the idea is older than software. Every movement is written twice: once as where the money came from, once as where it went. The two sides have to agree. When they do, the balance is not an opinion. When they do not, something is wrong and you want to know immediately rather than at month end.
That is the difference between a wallet ledger and a column in a database. A column can be edited. A ledger records the movement that changed it, so the history of a balance is the balance.
Four balances
What your finance team sees.
A business trading inside your product sees its position as four numbers rather than one, because money that has arrived and money you can use are not the same thing.
Available Balance
What can be used now. The part of the actual balance that is not already committed to somebody else.
Pending Credits
On the way in. Money that has been initiated but is not yet confirmed by the payment provider.
Pending Payments
On the way out. Money committed to leave, including a withdrawal that is waiting on review.
Those four are the merchant view, held for each business trading inside your product. Your own ecosystem wallet sits above them, and personal wallets sit below. Which means the answer to whose money is whose is a structural fact rather than a calculation.
Reconciliation
What happens when the sides disagree.
A ledger that only records is a filing cabinet. The value is in what it does when a movement does not add up.
- Both sides are written together. A movement is not half-recorded. Either the pair is written or the movement did not happen.
- The pair is checked automatically. Agreement is verified rather than assumed, and the check runs on the movement rather than on a nightly sweep.
- A difference is raised, not absorbed. When the two sides do not match, the exception is surfaced as an exception. Nothing is quietly rounded into a balance.
- A payment split has to add up. When one payment is divided between several parties as it is made, the parts must add up to the amount paid. A split that does not balance is not accepted.
This is also why a transfer cannot be undone. Transfers are instant, and they cannot be reversed, because reversing one would mean rewriting a pair of entries that have already been checked. The wallet says so before anyone confirms a transfer, and asks for a one-time code first.
Getting it out
Every movement, for any period.
A ledger nobody can read is a compliance risk rather than a control. The records come out in the shape your finance team already works in.
Every movement can be exported for any period, straight into a spreadsheet. That export is what your finance people reconcile against, and it is the same record the four balances are built from, so the two cannot disagree.
Your team reaches it from inside your own system. There is no separate portal to sign in to, and access is role-based, so a person sees the wallets their role covers and nothing else.
Currency
One wallet, one currency.
A wallet holds one currency, set when the wallet is opened. Wallets run today in ZAR, GBP, EUR and AED.
Holding one currency per wallet is what keeps the ledger arithmetic honest: there is no conversion happening inside a balance, so a balance never moves because a rate moved. Each deployment is configured for its country, currency and language.
The currency selector on this site is a display preference for reading the pages. It does not convert anything, and the amounts on every wallet screen here are illustrations rather than quotes.
Questions
What people ask about the record.
What is a wallet ledger?
The record of every movement into and out of every wallet, written so that any balance can be rebuilt from the movements behind it. In a DigiWise wallet every amount is recorded twice and checked automatically, and a disagreement between the two sides is raised rather than absorbed.
Why are there four balances instead of one?
Because money that has arrived, money you can use, money on the way in and money committed to leave are four different facts. Actual Balance, Available Balance, Pending Credits and Pending Payments are the merchant view of those four.
Can we export the records?
Yes. Every movement can be exported for any period, straight into a spreadsheet, and it is the same record the four balances are built from.
Can a movement be edited after the fact?
No. A correction is a new movement rather than an edit to an old one, which is why a transfer cannot be reversed and why a refund is recorded as a refund rather than as the original payment disappearing.
Can one wallet hold more than one currency?
No. A wallet holds one currency, set when it is opened. Wallets run today in ZAR, GBP, EUR and AED, and each deployment is configured for its country, currency and language.
See the record on your own numbers.
Tell us how money moves through your product today and we will show you what the ledger would hold for it.