Failure to Balance

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Tue Mar 6 23:07:56 EST 2007


First thing I would try is "Check & Repair" which should make sure all
your transactions are balanced.  This will add splits to the Unreconciled
or Imbalance accounts.  From there, I dont know what to tell you.  It
does sound like there are missing transactions that got deleted.

-derek

Quoting "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>:

> 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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-- 
       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



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