Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 08:57:11AM -0500, Tom Purl wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2007 10:26 pm, Derek Atkins wrote:
> >
> > This would imply that you're missing a $6.36 transaction, probably it
> > got deleted or moved to a different account.
> >
> 
> Ok, problem solved.  Apparently, I deleted a 6.36 transaction from
> January.  Once I added that back and re-reconciled that individual
> transaction, everything was back to normal.

So you did end up inserting a $6.36 transaction, as proposed.  The 
difference is that you knew it was the right thing to do when you 
finally did it!
 
> 
> Thanks to everyone for their help!  In the future, when I'm off like
> this, I'll be sure to check old bank statements for a transaction that
> matches the difference between the correct and incorrect reconciled
> values.
> 
> Of course, a more effective  course of action would be not deleting
> reconciled transactions :)  I still don't know how I did that, however.

It turns out to be easy, at least with the version of gnucash I was 
running recently.

Only one end of a transaction is reconciled.  When I reconcile my 
chequing account, a cheque gets marked recondiled when I find it on my 
bank statement.  But in the corresponding expense or liabilities 
account, it is not marked reconciled.  Presumably, if it's my phone bill 
it's paying, I can take my entire history of phone bills and reconcile 
them, too, if I should be so inclined (I'm not)..

If I'm at the phone end ot the transaction, I can also change the 
account the phone bill is being paid from, say, by letting it be paid 
from a credit card instead of my chequing account.  The result is a 
fully reconciled transaction, complete with cheque number, on my credit 
card account!

I do wish gnucash would issue a warning if a change to a transaction 
could affect *any* of the accounts it is reconciled in, before or after, 
not just the one I have onscreen. 

I don't mind if it involves changes on the nonreconciled ends of 
transactions.  Changing a payment's destination from "Imbalance" to 
"Phone" is quite common!

-- hendrik