Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance

Colin Law clanlaw at googlemail.com
Sat Oct 26 16:52:54 EDT 2013


On 26 October 2013 21:41, David <dgpickett at aol.com> wrote:
> Maybe I still have a mangled transaction in the future pile (a year of anticipated bills), and once I reconcile them all, I will not need my now future fake transaction.
>
> It is like having a spreadsheet with hidden columns, one you cannot sort, one you cannot do bulk changes to.  Now, I know a ledger needs to be more stable and hard to accidentally change than a spreadsheet, whose great weakness is the fragile nature of the storage.  But there is no need to hide the additional values that make up the reconciled starting balance.
>
>  The fact that I cannot reconcile my opening transaction because of some old transaction at a future date is silly.  Fixing it with a fake transaction reconciled and moved to the future is using the bug against itself.  People have been coming here to beg for help on this for years.  I provided it as a help to other victims, until the reconcile is made controllable and visible.

I for one cannot understand what you are talking about.  There is no
hidden reconcile information, the only information is the amount of
each transaction and whether it is reconciled or not, which is clearly
visible to all.  When you open the reconcile window the Starting
Balance is merely the sum of all reconciled transactions on that
account.

Colin

>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com>
> To: Philip Tait <philip at taits.org>
> Cc: DGPickett <dgpickett at aol.com>; GNU Cash User <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Sent: Fri, Oct 25, 2013 9:56 pm
> Subject: Re: Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Philip Tait <philip at taits.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 3:13 PM, DGPickett <dgpickett at aol.com> wrote:
>
>> I had an account where I had been replacing reconciled transactions with
>> copied more accurately split ones, and it was off even for the first
>> transaction, which seems like a bug.
>>
>
> The most likely source of the "bug" is that the replacement splits that you
> entered don't add up the same as the originals.
>
>
>
>> Since the imbalance must be coming from deleted reconciled transactions
>> down
>> the time line, I made a fake transaction with a very low date, reconciled
>> it
>> using whatever balance worked and redated it way down the time stream.
>>  Now,
>> by changing that balance, I can get any reconciliation to work with the
>> real
>> balance of that date.  Once things are all reconciled again, I cannot
>> delete
>> that fake or they go off balance.
>>
>> There should be a way to zap the account back to all 'n' with $0 balance
>> reconciled, so it can be re-reconciled.  I was sad to see repair did not do
>> this.
>>
>
> I may be misunderstanding what you want to do, but you cannot have it both
> ways -- I would think you you must either have accurate transactions OR
> correcting transactions to make the balances correct.
>
> It sounds like you need to un-reconcile and re-reconcile ALL the
> transactions from the point where you deleted and re-entered them so you
> can find out where you made your mistake(s), rather than entering
> correcting transactions.
>
>
>
>
> Isn't that what he said above: "There should be a way to zap the account back to all 'n' with $0 balance
>  reconciled, so it can be re-reconciled."?
>
>
>
>
> Well I took up the challenge -- I created a copy of a data file tried one thing that did NOT work (but I believe SHOULD have):
>
>
> I created a new bank account (in current assets) then deleted the old bank account, and when GnuCash asked where I wanted the transactions in the old account to be moved, I chose the new bank account I had created. UNFORTUNATELY when I did that, the transactions showed up in the new account still reconciled. :-(
>
>
> The only thing I have found out that DOES work is to start at the top of the register and click the "y," I told GnuCash I did want to unreconcile but didn't want to see any more warnings about unreconciling for THIS session. I pressed the Enter key to move to the next transaction. Then I worked my way down the register, clicking "y" and pressing Enter. When I got to the bottom of the screen it scrolled to the next line with each Enter (I think you can change this in the preferences) but the Click-Enter-Click-Enter process went through the entire register really quickly.
>
>
>  (All of this is using GnuCash 2.4.13, the current stable version.)
>
>
>
> I never did find a way to un-reconcile a month or a register at a time, as I thought I remembered. SO in this case, I recommend unreconciling the transactions one-by-one, then re-reconciling against the old statements all the way to the present to find and correct the errors in the newly-entered split transactions.
>
>
>
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