Reconciling account - Starting Imbalance

[cosmodog at comcast.net]

On Sep 17, 2004, at 8:58 AM, David Brock wrote:

> Okay, last night, I went to reconcile my chequeing account against my
> statement, and although all the transactions were there, the "Opening
> Balance" on the account was off by $450 (high, IIRC), so I couldn't
> finish it.
>

David, You can always "finish" a reconcile.  The toolbar "finish" 
button stays grayed until the balance is zero but there is a "finish" 
command available at menu>reconcile>finish.

More generally...

To be able to recover from accidents that screw up the reconciled 
balance, I add an "informational" transaction as the last entry in each 
statement period like this:

Date     Num  Description                       Transfer R Debit Credit 
Balance
08/18/04 Stmt Statement 2004.08.18 1586.23 bal           y

These transactions have no transfer account and no debit or credit 
values.
If the Balance column doesn't agree with the bal that I put in the 
description field I know something is wrong.  If I sort the register by 
the Num field I can see all the "informational" Stmt transactions at 
the same time making it easy to see where the problem begins and ends.

Richard