Reconciliation [Proposed Change]

[Tim Wunder]

On Tuesday 11 September 2007 7:51:43 am lingwitt at bellsouth.net wrote:
> On 10 Sep 2007, at 10:28:47 PM, David Reiser wrote:
> > Certainly. But the detail is that once reconciled, you never have
> > to go back further in time to find any error than to go back to the
> > last reconciliation date.
>
> Definition (investopedia.com): An accounting process used to compare
> two sets of records to ensure the figures are in agreement and are
> accurate.
>
> On 10 Sep 2007, at 10:33:14 PM, keith wrote:
> > Reconciliation serves 2 purposes. One is to check that the amounts
> > of the items charged to accounts are correct. The other is to make
> > sure that the bank's balance for the account is the same as yours.
> > To make the second work you need to know that the starting balance
> > is correct. So you need to reconcile bank statements in order.
> > Gnucash does let you mark the amounts as you compare them with the
> > bank statement, even if you do not do a reconciliation. So you can
> > do 1 without 2 if you want; you just cannot call the amounts
> > reconciled.
>
> It seems like the current version of reconciliation is incomplete.
>
> To reconcile, one should specify two things:
>
> 	(1) Start Date
> 	(2) End Date
>
<snip>
Where in the definition of reconciliation do you see the requirement that the 
user gets to set an arbitrary Start date? The Start Date in gnucash's 
implementation of the reconciliation process is set to the last 
reconciliation date. I rather doubt that's going to change. 

Your choices would seem to be, conform to gnucash's implementation, change 
gnucash's implematiation, or use software that does what you want. My 
relatively uneducated guess is that it would be a major task to change 
gnucash's implemetaion of reconcilliation, so you really only have 2 choices.

My recommendation is that you pick a point in time where you /know/ all the 
transactions are correct, and the balance is correct, then reconcile to that 
point and move forward. That's what I did the 5 or 6 years ago or so when I 
migrated my quicken data to gnucash.

Don't make it more difficult than it needs to be...

HTH, 
Tim

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