Reconcile initial balance error

[Steve Kelem]

I'm trying to reconcile my 401(k) account.  When I click on all the appropriate transactions, I get the Reconcile popup with the following information:

Funds In	Funds Out
<Transactions checked and unchecked>
Total: $	Total: $6,000.00

Starting Balance:   $0.00
Ending Balance:     $0.00
Reconciled Balance:     $
Difference:             $

The "Finish" button is grayed out.

This means I can't finish the Reconcile operation.

Any ideas of what's wrong?

Thanks,
Steve

Derek Atkins said the following on 04/30/2007 03:15 PM:
> 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
>