Yeah, if you wanted the balance of an address, the getreceivedbyaddress call would have been a logical choice. If you're looking for "fresh" deposits, you could also use listunspent (altough as soon as you spend those unspent outputs, they'll no longer be listed, so it might not be a good idear to use this call).

getbalance does not give you any details, so if you're tracking deposits from multiple users, this call does not suffice