editing a reconciled split

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 11:43:54PM -0600, Rich Duzenbury wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 17:51 -0400, Englisch, Volker (NIH/NCI) [C] wrote:
> > > I have reconciled splits that I would like to edit.
> > > I only want to edit the description and not the date, account or
> > amount.
> > >
> > > When I make the edit I get a dialogue warning me about my actions.
> > > "Change reconciled split? .... Doing so might make future
> > > reconciliation difficult! ..."
> > 
> > The message is a warning. It reminds you of a potential problem you
> > might
> > encounter if you're not careful.
> > 
> > Changing the description doesn't hurt anything.  I do that often myself
> > (changing the description or the check number field) but you want to be 
> > very careful not to accidentally change one of the other fields.
> > I did that once and learned my lesson. :-)
> >  
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Oops, I did not heed this warning, and now I have a problem balancing a
> checking account.  
> 
> What is the repair procedure, please?  How painful might it be?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Regards,
> Rich

Do you hace before-and-after gnucash files in the directory where you 
keep your gnucash file?  If so, you can gunzip them, and use diff to 
find out what changed.  With any luck, you can figure out from all the 
XML gibberish just what happened, and from that figure out just which of 
those things was the one that broke your reconciliation.  After that, 
just run gnucash again and undo whatever it was you did.

If the problem happened so long ago that you don't have backup files to 
compare, well, you're in trouble.  I've done this, and been happy enough 
with the results that I've told gnucash to retain backup files for about 
40 years.  Yes.  That's probably overkill, but I expect disk storage to 
get cheaper.

-- hendrik