Reconciled statements

[Wesley Sheldahl]

Hi,

I want to share a problem I just ran into, which will lead up to a feature
request at the end.

I started using GnuCash last September for very basic personal finances. 
Two accounts relevant to this discussion are my checking account, and a
three-year loan account that will be paid off next month.  Both are with
the same local bank, and I have the payments set up to happen
automatically.

I happened to ask the bank for a statement of the loan's current status so
I could confirm exactly when it would be paid and how much the last payment
would be.  When I went to reconcile their records with my own in GnuCash, I
found that I entered the loan's then-current balance back on 10/10/2000,
did NOT enter the 10/15/2000 payment, but did enter all the payments on the
15th of the month from November up until this month.  So the balance of my
loan is less than I thought, by approximately the amount of one monthly
payment.

My problem is, I've been reconciling my checking account bank statement
each month, yet somehow missed entering the payment last October.  If I
enter the payment now, it'll ripple through all the statements from then
until now.  Obviously, I've managed to compensate somewhere along the line,
but I don't know how to go about finding and fixing it.  Once upon a time,
I was using a product called something like InCharge with OS/2.  When I
marked a transaction cleared in that product, it would save the statement
date that contained the cleared transaction with it.  It also had a report
that would let you look at just the transactions from a particular
statement, including opening and closing balances, and total debits and
credits during that month.  That would be helpful about now, as I could use
it to verify that my October statement really did balance.  (Yes, I've been
in this jam before.)  As it stands, it looks like I would need to mark the
whole account unreconciled and go through month by month to mark them
cleared.

So, I'd like to propose adding the statement date to the cleared flag, or
some way to save that information so we can report by statement.  Being
able to close out the books on a year would also be helpful.  Any
suggestions for my current predicament would be welcome as well.  Thanks.

-- 
Wes Sheldahl
wsheldahl@qx.net