incorrect starting balance in reconcile

[John Ralls]

> On Mar 21, 2018, at 12:22 PM, darrylctx <darrylctx at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am trying to reconcile a Bank account.  
> Everything has been working fine since I opened the account, but recently I
> tried to reconcile a statement, and the starting balance of the reconcile is
> incorrect.
> At the end of every statement, I put in a trxn with 0 value and the correct
> ending balance in the description so that I can quickly check the ledger.
> The starting balance had always matched the correct balance for the account
> on the next reconcile.  This time it did not.
> After reading through a lot of posts concerning incorrect starting balances,
> I decided to unreconcile all the trxns in the account and re-reconcile.  
> After un-reconciling back the account open, when I try to reconcile the
> first trxn (amount = 0), the starting balance in the reconcile is not zero. 
> There are no trxns before this one trxn I am trying to reconcile.
> 
> HOW CAN THIS BE?
> 
> It appears that GNU Cash is keeping a reconciled balance in the file that is
> no longer correct.
> 
> I can fix this with an entry to balance the starting balance and make a note
> that it is because of a bug in GNUCash, but this is very bad, as if anyone
> ever looks at the books, they will ask the legitimate question:
> 
> Can I trust a program that requires adjusting entries because of bugs?
> 
> Once all txns in an account are unreconciled, it should be possible to reset
> the starting balance for the account to the correct starting balance.
> 
> Based on all the related posts I've seen, this appears to be an ongoing
> problem.

Nope. GnuCash calculates balances on the fly, starting from the first transaction in the account, at file open and every time you change something. Balances aren't written out. If you have a reconciled balance it's because there are reconciled splits in the account.

Regards,
John Ralls