Get in touch
One address, and it goes to a person rather than a ticket queue. Write about anything — something's broken, something won't install, something in the app doesn't make sense, or something you wish it did.
Support is email, and only email
Email supportOr copy the address into whatever you use for mail: support@balancedsum.com
Who's actually reading it
Balanced Sum is a very small operation — the person who answers the mail is the person who wrote the software. That's the good part: you're not explaining your problem to someone reading from a script, and if it turns out to be a bug, the reply and the fix come from the same place.
It's also the limit, and we'd rather say it here than have you wonder on a Sunday. There is no support desk, no phone line, no chat window, and no promised response time — none of those would be honest for an operation this size. In practice most mail gets an answer within a day or two — that's what we aim for, not a guarantee you should build a workday around. If it's been longer than that, you haven't been ignored; send it again and it'll get picked up.
Reporting something that's broken
Balanced Sum runs entirely on your own machine, which means nobody here can look over your shoulder, open your company file, or read a log off a server — there is no server. Whatever you can tell us in the email is genuinely all we have to go on, so three things make the difference between a fix and a guess.
What you were doing
The screen you were on and the thing you clicked, in ordinary words — "I was recording a payment against an invoice and clicked Save." Enough that someone can walk the same path in a fresh copy of the app.
What happened, and what you expected instead
The exact wording of any error message (a photo or screenshot of the screen is perfect), or a plain description if there wasn't one — "the total came out $40 short," "the page just sat there." Both halves matter: what it did, and what it should have done.
Your version and your Windows
The version number from the Settings screen, and whether you're on Windows 10 or 11. Two lines that rule out a whole category of wrong answers.
Please never send us your books
No database backups, no company files, no exports of your ledger, no bank statements — not zipped, not "just the one account," not to help us reproduce it. Those files are your customers, your payroll, your bank balances, and your whole financial history, and we don't want them anywhere near our inbox. There is no situation in which sending them is the fastest way to a fix.
The reason this is safe to insist on is the same reason the software works the way it does: everything runs on your computer, and your data never leaves it. We couldn't look at your books if we wanted to. A screenshot with the numbers blacked out, or a two-line description of the shape of the problem, has always been enough — and if a bug ever genuinely needs a file to chase down, we'll tell you how to make a tiny made-up company that reproduces it instead. See the privacy page for exactly what does and doesn't leave your machine.
What else email is good for
Getting it installed
Setup is the hardest part of a program that runs on your own machine, even now that it's Node.js and one command. If the first launch can't fetch PostgreSQL, or something stops before the dashboard opens, tell us which step of GETTING-STARTED you're on and what it said. That one's usually quick.
Bringing your history across
If a migration won't reconcile, or your old software's export has a shape the column matcher can't make sense of, say which program it came from and what the wizard told you. Describe the columns — don't attach the file.
Asking for something it doesn't do
There's a deliberate list of what it doesn't do, and some of it is permanent. But the list isn't a wall — if the missing piece is what's stopping you using it, that's worth knowing, and it's how most of what's here got built.
What we can't help with
We can't tell you how to categorize a transaction, whether something is deductible, or how to file your taxes. Balanced Sum isn't a substitute for a licensed accountant and neither is its author — that's your accountant's question, and it's worth asking them.
What happens to your email
We end up with your message and your address, and we use them to answer you. That's the whole of it: no list, no newsletter, nothing sold or handed on, and nothing about you joined up with anything else. It's covered, along with everything else, on the privacy page.