Reconciling of account

[Geert Janssens]

On Monday 03 November 2014 16:57:10 Ken G. wrote:
> > On 4/11/2014 07:00, Ken G. wrote:
> >> While reconciling my checking account yesterday, I was annoyed at
> >> having to individually check off the little square boxes by using
> >> the
> >> mouse and clicking each box, one at a time. It was so much easily
> >> in
> >> the past to have had use the space bar by holding it down and
> >> automatically checking off each box as fast as you can. Am I
> >> missing
> >> something on how to do this now?
> >> 

For your use case you could now use CTRL-A, followed SPACE.

That will select all the items to reconcile and then mark all of them as reconciled in one go. 
Should be even faster than hitting space many times in a row.

> >> I am using GnuCash 2.6.1 on a el cheapo HP computer using Ubuntu
> >> 14.04.1 as the OS.
> >> 
> >> Thanks,
> >> 
> >> Ken
> 
> On 11/03/2014 04:25 PM, prl wrote:
> > I use SPACE, DOWN to check off items when I'm reconciling. SPACE
> > used
> > to advance automatically.
> > 
> > Peter
> 
> Yes, I love the automatic advancing. I wonder why it was taken out of
> the current version.
> 
If I remember correctly it was taken out as part of the preparations to an eventual migration to 
gtk3 (the graphical toolkit used by gnucash).

There were several obsoleted gui elements in the gnucash code that had to be replaced to be 
able to make that migration. The reconcile window was also using a deprecated gui element.

While looking at how to implement it we noticed that the way the reconcile window worked 
was inconsistent with how the rest of gnucash works.

On the positive side the trick with hitting space continuously was a very fast way to reconcile 
every item in the list.

On the flip side were several other aspects though:
- this behavior  was also confusing for people not used to it. When first opened, there is a 
rectangle around the first item in the list. What does that mean ? A selected line perhaps ? The 
rest of gnucash uses a colored background to indicate a selected line. Hit space and the 
rectangle moves to the next line and your first line gets selected. So what is selected now and 
what does the rectangle mean ? If you hit tab to move to the right-hand side list nothing is 
selected anymore in either list. However hitting space suddenly the right-hand side list gets 
updated... So there were plenty of inconsistencies both in how the reconcile window behaved 
and how its behavior aligned with how gnucash in general does things.
- on top of that, the main purpose of the reconcile window is not to mark all entries as 
reconciled as fast as possible. Its main purpose is to manually compare the entered lines 
against your bank statements. So the window should not be optimized for speed entry, but for 
easy comparing.

These things together lead to the new design.
- Most basic workflow: click on each checkbox that you have manually verified.
- You can also change multiple lines at once using a combination of shift-click or ctrl-click and 
then use the menu options to reconcile or unreconcile the selected items.
- For keyboard input: use the arrow keys to navigate to the line you want to change, multi-line 
selections are possible by holding the shift key. Then use ctrl-r to reconcile the selected line(s) 
or ctrl-u to unreconcile. Hitting space toggles the reconcile state. (Note if you selected a mix of 
reconciled and unreconciled items the first time you hit space all items will be aligned to one 
state, depending on which type was selected most).
- For fast reconciliation of all items: hit ctrl-a, space.

Hopefully this helps to explain the motivations behind the changes.

Best regards,

Geert