Reconciling questions

[Ronal B Morse]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 14:37:33 timzak wrote:
> Hi, I've been using Gnucash for about a month now and I'm
> still learning about it.  I have input about 4.5 months
> of data (from Jan 1st to present) and am pretty satisfied
> with the program so far.  I have not yet done any
> reconciling.
>
> 1) Is it required to reconcile accounts that are
> reconcilable?  So far I've only cleared the transactions,
> and everything seems fine.
>
> 2) (If I do decide to reconcile) how would I go about
> reconciling January when my bank's statements appear to
> be mid-month to mid-month.  I have no data in Gnucash
> prior to Jan. 1st, so how can I reconcile January when
> the bank statement begins in mid-December?
>
> Thanks for your time.

I had a partial first month when I started Gnucash and my 
approach was to make a dummy transaction into the first 
month's entries that made the reconciliation work against 
the next bank statement I received (balance adjustment, 
ex:miscellaneous). Since then I have been scrupulous about 
reconciling against the statement. 

If you download account activity from your bank on a regular 
basis you can reconcile against cleared transactions. Use 
the cleared amount as the account closing balance in the 
reconcile dialog and check off the transactions that have 
shown to have cleared.