# Balances Audit

Accounts with recent balance changes are subject to an **Automatic Balance Audit** that runs periodically — approximately every hour on books where balances have changed. The audit takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the volume of transaction history that has not yet been audited.

For the conceptual overview of how balances work, see [Core Concepts — Balances](https://bkper.com/docs/core-concepts.md#balances).

A clock icon next to balance values in the left menu indicates the audit has not yet run. Once the audit completes, the icon disappears.

The automatic audit guarantees that balance values are consistent with the transaction history in your book. Although extremely unlikely, any inconsistency detected by the audit triggers an automatic settlement that restores the correct balance based on the transaction history.

> **Note**
> The Balance Audit is not the same as a reconciliation with real-life accounts. It is an internal consistency check that ensures balances match the recorded transactions.
## Triggering an audit manually

If you need the audit to run immediately rather than waiting for the next automatic cycle, hold the **Shift** key and click the **reload** button in your book.

The audit runs asynchronously. You can confirm it has finished when the clock icon next to the affected balances disappears.

## Background

Bkper stores accounts and transactions in a distributed, highly scalable database that replicates data across a wide geographic area for reliability and fault tolerance.

This architecture provides a robust foundation for finance and accounting in the cloud, but it introduces a potential [double-spending](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending) problem — a scenario where concurrent operations could, in very rare cases, lead to balance inconsistencies.

To address this, Bkper developed an audit infrastructure based on [consensus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)) that has been refined over more than six years. This system runs periodically and ensures all balances remain strictly consistent.