Newbies, account setup and manual reconciliation

[Jeff Smith]

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?

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. I assume you are manually entering a 
> transaction when you pay your bill. Then later, when you download 
> transactions, you get a duplicate of that transaction. Either one of 
> these could be deleted. Reconciliation is unrelated. when you reconcile, 
> you will mark whichever of these transactions is left. That is, when you 
>  check off the transaction on your statement, you will check off the 
> matching one in the account in gnucash. that's all there is to it. what 
> am I missing in your question?

Actually, I don't do manual entries. At the end of each month, I 
download the transaction records from my bank. Each month includes a 
record of a payment to a credit card. (Call this the bank's record.) 
Then, I download a set of transactions from my credit card company. 2 or 
3 days after my bank shows the payment, my credit card company shows a 
corresponding receipt of funds, which I will call the card's record. 
(Why they don't show up on the same day is a matter for banking politics.)

So now I have two records of the same transaction, from both sides of 
the fence. I was thinking that card's record should be treated simply as 
a reconciling entry to match against the bank's record. Or am I missing 
something?

-- 
Jeff Smith
Computer Science Dept.
University of Saskatchewan
http://jefficus.usask.ca