Failure to Balance

[David T.]

I've been humming along quite happily for a while now, but last night I ran
into something that has me stumped. 

I was balancing my primary checking account from the bank statement, and each
time, it was off by $1350. The account had correctly balanced after the
December 2006 statement, and I was working on the January 2007 statement. For
some reason, the starting balance in the Reconcile dialog was low by $1350,
which had me confused. Following through with the reconciliation yielded the
same $1350 discrepancy, and all the debits & credits matched the bank
statement.

The only way I can imagine this circumstance occurring is if I were to have
deleted a previously reconciled transaction (or transactions), and the only way
I imagine that happening is if I had a second instance of the transaction, and
deleted the (checking-reconciled) duplicate from the other account [BTW, this
situation comes up for me often because many transactions import as single
lines, but I track multiple lines, which I handle by duplicating an earlier
entry. Then I delete the vanilla transaction.] 

If this were true, though, there ought to be either an unreconciled transaction
in Checking or an unbalanced transaction somewhere else. But there are no
earlier unreconciled transactions in Checking, and I don't see any transactions
in *other* accounts that no longer balance out. A search of the file for a
transaction in this amount turns up nothing (although of course it could be
more than one transaction causing the trouble).

I have no idea how this could have happened, but fully expect user error. (In
other words, I don't believe that I'm out $1350, just that I suck at keeping
track of what I do have). I have a few questions, though:

1) Does anyone have suggestions on other steps I could take to track down the
error? 

2) Assuming that I never do figure this out, what is the appropriate approach
to  getting balance back in my account? I entered a Zeroing transaction, and
drew from the Unbalanced account, in the idea that if I do find the mistake,
the kludge will be obvious to find. Is this right? Furthermore, does it make a
difference what date I use for the fix? I opted for using today's date, again
assuming that it makes clear that the problem was discovered today.

I await any suggestions from the list.

David


 
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