starting balance

[Maf. King]

On Tuesday 24 October 2006 22:29, Bob W. Anderson wrote:
> I've been using GnuCash for about three years, now under SuSE 10.1.
>
> Last week, I couldn't reconcile because the Starting Balance did not
> correspond to the bank statement.   I read that the starting balance is
> not editable.   I don't know what caused the discrepancy nor how to
> remedy it.    Is GnuCash infallible and thus the bank at fault?   How
> to proceed?

Hi Bob,

Has the account reconciled in the past?  If so, then you must have changed an 
already-reconciled transaction. And so the fun begins, trying to find that 
change.

You can't edit the starting balance in the reconcile dialog, as that is a 
sum-of-all-previously-reconciled-transactions calculated value

>
> Can anyone help me decipher the numerical names assigned by GnuCash to
> saved files?    It looks like the first four numbers ought to be the
> year, but mine are almost all 2005!   Could my computer be saving the
> files elsewhere than my Home directory?    I'm trying to find the saved
> files of a month ago, so I can start with a known starting balance and
> rebuild from there.
>
> All feedback and suggestions gratefully appreciated.

Your accounts data file could be saved anywhere.  Let me rephrase that. GC 
doesn't care where you saved your data file! 

(In version 2.0.1), if you go file->save as, you will get a clue about the 
full path of the current data file.

- the series of numbers is a timestamp from the backups that GC makes on each 
save, so for example, my most recent datafiles look like:

accounts.xac 
accounts.xac.20061022001257.xac

- the first is my working file, the second is a backup created at 12 minutes 
and 57 seconds past midnight on October 22nd.  (there is a .log file too, for 
transaction replays)

If you ever rolled-back to a backup, then you could possibly have backups with 
multiple timestamps in the filename.

HTH,
Maf