Reconcilliation Woes

[Derek Atkins]

E Dodd <edodd at billiau.net> writes:

> On Thursday 14 April 2005 06:14, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
>> Its always wrong in that it grabs the register balance on the statement
>> closing day. While it may on occasion be the right number, it is never
>> the right number because the proper number is the closing balance from
>> the bank statement. make sense?
>
> if you have got all your entries in correctly, then it will be right and you 
> have an easy job ahead of you to finish the reconciliation.
> if you are trying to reconcile before you have the register complete, you are 
> doing things the hard way.

That's not necessarily true..  If you have lots of transactions and
there is any delay between when you initiate a transaction and the
bank posts the transaction then it can be off.  However for cases like
a credit card I rarely find this to be the case.  It's more likely to
be the case for my Bank, where there's delays in processing BillPay
and Deposit transactions.  If I initiate those near the boundary it's
unclear which statement period they will fall under.

Still, calling what GnuCash does "wrong" is inaccurate.  GnuCash
gives you a GUESS.  You're supposed to correct it if the value is
wrong.  Leaving it blank and making the user fill it in would cause
more work on the user's part in the case where the guess is correct.
Just because Quicken is broken this way does not imply GnuCash
should reduce its own functionality.

If the docs aren't clear on how the reconciliation process works, by
all means please submit text to help improve the docs.

-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