Money you already had isn't money you saved
Open an account in March with $15,000 already in it and no honest system should congratulate you for saving $15,000 on day one. You didn't save it that day. You brought it with you, and progress has to start from there.
A starting balance is where you begin, not what you did
When you first record an account, its balance is a fact about the past: this is what you had when you started keeping track. It isn't income, it isn't this month's saving, and it didn't happen on the day you typed it in. It is your starting line.
The distinction matters the moment you set a goal. Save $10,000 is a goal about money you put away from now on. If the $15,000 you already had counted, you would clear the goal before you saved a dollar, and the progress bar would be measuring the wrong thing.
Why apps get this wrong
A tool that treats every dollar that appears as a dollar that arrived can't tell a starting balance from a deposit. So the day you set up your accounts looks like the best income month of your life, and any goal tied to a balance looks half-done before you've begun.
The damage is quiet but lasting. Your baseline is inflated, so every trend measured from it is off, and a goal you were genuinely working toward is robbed of the thing that makes it motivating: watching it fill from empty.
How it's recorded properly
The balance you start with is booked as your beginning net worth, a one-time opening figure that says where you stood on day one. It counts toward what you are worth, because you do own it, and it counts toward nothing you saved, because you didn't.
Marked Money keeps opening balances out of your progress. When a goal measures only what you add from a date, the money that was already there on that date starts you at zero, so ten thousand saved means ten thousand of new money, not ten thousand you happened to walk in with.
Marked Money splits a loan payment for you and keeps the three parts straight afterwards, so paying down a debt stops looking like spending it.
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