What is the practical purpose of reconciling in GNUCash?

[Kevin Reid]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 6:26 AM, replicon <replicon at gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems to me like nothing but a feel-good blue line that makes it harder
> to refactor your CoA later (e.g. suppose you suddenly want to know how much
> you've been spending on coffee every day, so maybe you want to create a
> subaccount under expenses and move all "coffee break" transactions in
> there). Or just in general, if I want to move accounts around, or
> whatever...


*Reconciling does not interfere with this type of reorganization* in the
usual cases.

The reconciled status is per-split, not per-transaction. For example, if
you have a transaction between *Liabilities:Credit Card* and
*Expenses:Dining*, and you regularly reconcile the *Credit Card* account
but never the *Dining* account, then you can freely change the split
referring to *Expenses:Dining* to use *Expenses:Coffee Break* instead and
GnuCash will not object.

(Reconciling the expense account *will* interfere, but as others have said,
there's no reason to do that.)

You can also freely rename or re-parent an account with reconciled
transactions.