Account reconciliation docs

[Derek Atkins]

Jon Lapham <lapham at extracta.com.br> writes:

> > I'm *not* an accountant, but Gnucash should display the balance of
> > the last
> > reconciled transaction as the starting balance, otherwise you'll get
> > a bit confused...
> 
> Oh sure, *you and I* know what "staring balance" is, my question is
> how does GnuCash know.  How is that value calculated.  It could be the
> sum of all reconciled transactions in that account, or the balance at
> the last reconciled transaction, or ....

This is a gnucash-devel question, not a gnucash-user question.
I'd have to look to see how is it actually implemented, but I 
dont have time this week..  Maybe someone else will..  Ask specifically
on -devel.

> So, I'm guessing, that most likely it looks at the balance as of the
> last reconciled transaction.  But, I asked to get a definitive answer.

Yes, but the balance of a particular transaction is computed
'recursively' from the balance of the previous transaction.

> Oh, okay, so "interest payment" means *interest earned* on that account?
>   Yeah, I'm with you, I think I would prefer to actually enter that
> manually.  Weird.  Why do we have this option?

Yes, it's the "Interested Paid to you for allowing the bank to use
your money"  It's here because some people felt it was a decent place
to add it for simple bank-statements.  Some banks don't actually
consider the interest to be a "transactions", and they are placed on
the statement as a separate line-item.

Basically, it's a UI "syntactic sugar" for entering an interest
payment transaction.

Note that in credit cards or, the interest could be paid BY you
instead of paid TO you...

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available