Changing reconciled records

[Dale Alspach]

I believe that the accountants way to handle this would be through a
journal or general ledger entry. I am not aware of such a thing in gnucash.
In your case a lot depends on whether you need a record of all changes or
you just want the totals to come out right. For personal accounting one
usually does not need an accurate transaction history.

Personal accounting:

Suppose that you have a credit card account CC and you thought you charged
$15 to it for a meal. You entered a transaction in the CC account (one line
style)

11/2/01  Joe's Bistro Dining_Out y _________   $15.00 

Later you realize that what you should have entered was

11/2/01  Joe's Bistro BusinessExp y _________   $15.00

The reconciliation is internal to the credit card account. It doesn't
matter (although gnucash may warn you) what the "other account" is. Just
change the other account and save. It is trickier if the other account is
an account which gets reconciled also and both have been reconciled. (As a
practical matter this seems an unlikely occurence) In that case I would
recommend entering a reversal with the date of the reversal and the date of
the correct entry the same. 

11/2/01  Joe's Bistro            Dining_Out y _________   $15.00
11/2/01  Joe's Bistro Correction Dining_Out n $15.00      _______
11/2/01  Joe's Bistro            BusinessExp n _________   $15.00

This is really cheating on the dates so a more proper sequence would be 

(1)

11/2/01  Joe's Bistro                        Dining_Out y _________   $15.00
12/7/01  Joe's Bistro Correction of 11/2/01  Dining_Out n $15.00      _______
12/7/01  Joe's Bistro Correction of 11/2/01  BusinessExp n _________   $15.00

or for reasons noted below a less troublesome approach

(2)

11/2/01  Joe's Bistro                      Dining_Out y _________   $15.00
11/2/01  Joe's Bistro Corrected on 12/7/01 Dining_Out n $15.00      _______
11/2/01  Joe's Bistro Corrected on 12/7/01 BusinessExp n _________   $15.00


When you  reconcile the CC account the next time mark both of these new
transactions even
though there may not be any corresponding items on your credit card
statement.

Even better would be to go to the transaction style and note the correction
in both halves of the transaction. You could also simulate a journal by
using another account called Journal or Corrections ( I would probably use
an equity account) Then make a transfer from Dining_Out to Journal and then
a transfer from Journal to BusinessExp and enter an appropriate description.
Anything put into Journal should also be taken out so that it always has a
zero balance each day. 

One caution on this is that any dating that crosses reporting time
boundaries may cause incorrect totals. If the correction had been made
after 1/1/02 (using the date of correction as in (1) )
and you totaled  BusinessExp for your 2001 taxes you would need to
go to Journal and find any transactions which reference 2001.
Then you would need to correct the totals. The problem is that there
is no entry date (that I know of) in the real file (just in the log). That
is why the second correction method (2) seems better to me. 

Dale Alspach