More Balance Sheet Woes

[David Brock]

I've identified a problem with my data that gives the old "unbalanced 
Balance Sheet" problem, and, after  watching my monitor for far too long 
earlier this week, and chatting with my teddy bear about it ;-), I have 
a few questions, generally a kind-of "What's going on here?" thing.

My data was imported from Quicken, but that was over a year ago.  At the 
time, I wasn't watching the Balance sheet, so it's likely that this 
problem arose at that time, but wasn't noticed until I started really 
getting into GC months later- I think I discussed this last 
Summer/Fall.  I'm using Gnucash 1.8.10 on FreeBSD.

My Balance Sheet, as of 11 Feb, 1996, is correct- the Assets balance 
with the Equity & Liabilities.  Yea, but that's the last time.  On 12 
Feb, 1996, it doesn't.  Off by about $35 (I'm not in front of the system 
ATM, so numbers are estimates)

The account balance differences over that 24 hours period are limited- 
there are only a small handful of accounts that changed, and according 
to the General Ledger, there are entries that balance most of the 
differences, ie, Assets and Liab went down by $200, and there is a 
corresponding transfer from Assets:Chequing to Liab:BankLoan for that 
amount.  Okay, good.

But, there are changes in account balances that have *no* corresponding 
entries in the General Ledger.  Mutual Fund "ABC" account went down by 
52.07 over the period, but no GL entry specifying that account.  Same 
for another Asset account that changed by 0.01.

When I look ing the account register for Fund "ABC" above, in fact, 
there are no entries at all for that account before Oct, 1996- many 
months after the date in question.

I have heard it said that the Balance Sheet is busticated, but not sure 
if that problem was fixed in 1.8.10- is it possible that these errors 
are not from my data, but from the report? 

Possibly notable:  I copied and browsed through the dat file, looking at 
transactions with the date 12/Feb/96 and found that they had another 
date field- "date-posted" I think, that was set to late 2003- it is 
possible that this was the date of the import from Quicken, but I can't 
be sure.  Is this pertinent?  Would the transactions hold the posted 
date from an imported date?  Is this a red herring- does it have no 
effect on the incorporation of the transaction into the reports?

Presumably, each of my transactions balance.  (Call me crazy)  Can I 
export them to a QIF that I can them import into a new, clean system, 
bit-by-bit, watching the reports to ensure that they're all okay at each 
step?  (I haven't found a way to export transactions, only accounts)

;-David