Reconcile initial balance error

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Steve Kelem <steve at kelem.net> writes:

> When I try to reconcile my brokerage account for the first time, I get
> an error with the starting balance.
> GC thinks that I have a starting balance of around $500,000!
> My hierarchy looks like the following:
>
> Assets
>   Investments
>     Brokerage Account
>       Primo Investments
>         Funds
>           Global Slush Fund
>         Stocks
>           MegaCorp
>
> The starting dates for these transactions is 1999-3-1, and I'm trying to
> get GnuCash to reconcile all this old data that I imported from Quicken.
>
> I have reconciled the leaf-level accounts for March 1999.
> When I try to reconcile the parent, Primo Investments, GnuCash shows a
> starting balance of $500,000 for this account, even though no
> transactions are before March 1999 in any of the accounts under Primo
> Investments.

Why are you reconciling the Primo Investments account separately?
Also, did you choose the "reconcile subaccounts" flag?  It's possible
that the $500,000 is the amount gnucash thinks you reconciled in
the subaccounts.

The "starting balance" is what gnucash computes as your current
reconciled balance, so it thinks you already reconciled $500,000.
That leads me to believe that you already have reconciled transactions
(perhaps from the children accounts).

As I repeat over and over, when you reconcile something that looks
strange, ignore the starting number and just worry about the ENDING
number.  Enter the correct ending balance and then when the dialog
comes up you'll have a better idea what's going on.  If the secondary
reconcile window doesn't look right you can just cancel and start over.

> After this problem, I added an Opening Balance transfer of 0 shares from
> Equity:Opening Balances to every account from Primo on down to all the
> leaf accounts under it.
> I have run the Check & Repair command, and I still get the wrong
> Starting Balance.

Yeah, this wont help.

> Can anyone help me out?

Hopefully I have..

> Thanks,
> Steve

-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