Reconcile does not work for me

[Svetoslav Trochev]

Jonathan Blake wrote:
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Ken Heard <ken at heard.name> wrote:
>   
> If the opening balance in gnucash was correct and every transaction on
> the statement (and no others) was marked as reconciled, then the
> difference between the statement balance and the balance of what
> you've reconciled should be zero. If you don't get a zero balance,
> then something doesn't match and gnucash hasn't really been reconciled
> to the statement.
>
> --
> Jonathan
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I am not an accountant so I can't speak how the reconcile really should
work, but I think I understand why Ken is having a problem here. I
believe he switched recently from other program to GnuCash, like me. In
my case I had several accounts that was correctly reconciled in Quicken,
but at the same time I was in to the process of re-entering old history.
As result I had several temporary transactions in order to maintain
correct balance. After I imported the data into GnuCash I had problem
reconciling the latest statement because in GnuCash the statement's
starting value is calculated based on sum of all reconciled
transactions.  As result I could not balance debits and credits. I
overcome that problem by resetting all current flags and reconciled
everything again from the beginning. This is very unpleasing experience.
I have traced the problem to the fact that reconciled window in GnuCash
is assuming that statement's starting balance is equal to the latest
reconciled value. This is actually only true if you reconcile your
account from start and never skip month.
More generic approach would be if GnuCash is calculating the statement's
starting value as sum of all reconciled transactions that are only prior
to the entered  statement's starting date. If this is made I and other
user could skip a month and reconcile it later.