What is a negative token balance?
A negative token balance indicates that an account or wallet is showing less than zero units of a coin or token. This situation doesn’t occur on the blockchain itself, since balances can’t drop below zero on-chain, but is usually the result of off-chain accounting errors or incomplete or mismatched transaction data coming from exchanges connected via API keys.
Why is it essential to fix negative balances?
Fixing negative token balances is essential because they can cause errors and confusion in your portfolio, transactions, and tax reporting. Here’s why:
💰 1. Accurate Portfolio Value
A negative balance shows you “owe” tokens you don’t actually have, which misrepresents your real holdings.
📉 2. Correct Gain/Loss Calculations
If balances are negative, the system may calculate profits or losses incorrectly, leading to misleading results.
🧾 3. Reliable Tax Reporting
Tax authorities expect your transactions and holdings to match reality. Negative balances can create compliance issues or trigger audits.
🔄 4. Avoid Future Errors
Unresolved negative balances can cascade into other calculations, affecting transfers, swaps, or portfolio syncing.
Choose your preferred resolution method
When starting the procedure to solve errors (missing prices, negative balance or differences), the software asks users to select which method to use.
By selecting Fix all automatically (fastest), the software will handle all the necessary fix, applying all the correction without any action required by the user.
If you would like to know more about the criteria used by the AI tool to solve negative balances, please read this article.
By selecting Correct one negative balance at a time, users can solve errors by applying manual fixes according to the following instructions (keep reading this guide).
How to fix negative balance
If choosing to solve the issue manually, users can click on the Manual transaction + button. This will open the modal to add a transaction.
The transaction types suggested by the software, will be limited to the options with the goal of solving the negative balance, which means adding an incoming/deposit or a trade where the token with negative balance will be the one bought (incoming).
To learn how to create a manual transaction, please read this guide.