We have introduced two new balance features to improve financial management for developers and businesses: Balance Snapshots and Historical Balances.

When reviewing your financial data, access to accurate historical records becomes crucial to your work. This is especially true when you are conducting an end-of-day reconciliation, closing out your monthly books, analyzing cash flow trends, preparing for a financial audit, or generating account statements to name a few.

Balance Snapshots

Balance Snapshots allows you to record daily snapshots of each balance to preserve historical data. This provides a reference point for constructing historical balances, auditing, reporting or analytical purposes.

Key advantages include:

• Point-in-time accuracy: Take balance snapshots for audits or financial statements without manual calculations. This eliminates the risk of errors that can occur with real-time data fluctuations, offering a stable reference point for regulatory reviews, tax filings, or internal financial assessments.
• API integration: Trigger snapshots programmatically during critical workflows like end-of-day audits, etc. This automation integrates seamlessly with your financial systems, enabling businesses to schedule snapshots at peak transaction times or key milestones, such as monthly closings or quarterly reviews, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

How it works

• Blnk takes one snapshot per day per balance when triggered.
• If the snapshot is triggered multiple times in a single day, it records only the first snapshot instance of a balance. Subsequent triggers will only record snapshots for new balances that have no snapshot for the day.
• The next snapshot can only be captured the following day.

For instance, consider the following user balance:

Historical Balances

The Historical Balances feature works hand-in-hand with Balance Snapshots allowing you to retrieve the exact balance at a particular historical point in time, specified via a timestamp.

How it works

• Blnk identifies the most recent snapshot taken before the specified timestamp. For example, when querying the balance on March 14 at 4:00 PM, Blnk retrieves the latest snapshot recorded before that time.
• Next, it reconstructs the balance by applying all transactions (credit and debits) that happened between the snapshot and the specified timestamp.
• Then, it returns the final computed balance reflecting the exact balance amount at the requested timestamp.

If no snapshot is found, Blnk builds the historical balance from genesis using transactions only, i.e. it adds all the transactions from the beginning till the requested timestamp.

Applying to our example

1. To determine the user balance at 4:00 PM on March 14, Blnk retrieves the balance from the most recent snapshot, which is from March 13 at 11:59 PM.
2. Since only one transaction occurred between the most recent snapshot time and 4:00 PM on March 14, Blnk adds this transaction to the snapshot balance to calculate the precise balance at 4:00 PM.
3. The user balance at March 14, 4:00 PM is $70.00