Newbies, account setup and manual reconciliation

[Glenn English]

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 12:50 -0600, Jeff Smith wrote:

> In the future, should I be flagging these redundant transactions as 
> "reconciliation" records, or just ignore them completely? Does it matter 
> which way I go?

The purpose of accounting is just what it says: to account for the money
flowing through your life. The picture of your $$ that gnucash presents
in its registers and reports is supposed to be true.

If you have duplicate entries in the system, that picture is false --
you didn't really pay the credit card bill twice, so you have garbage
in. 

Once one of them is deleted, the picture is true again, so the one
remaining needs to be treated like any other transaction. It really
happened, so it has to be considered in the reconciliation. If it isn't,
the picture becomes false again because the transaction has gone through
the bank and been reported in the bank statement.

Reconciling is nothing more than synchronizing a piece of gnucash's view
of your money with the bank's. The statement is just the bank's opinion
of what happened recently. 

-- 
Glenn English
ghe at slsware.com
GPG ID: D0D7FF20