Transaction Reconciliation

[David Carlson]

David,

My bank also has a summary section in their monthly statement which has nice information but that info does not help with the reconciliation process.  The transaction counts and deposit and withdrawal totals could be produced by GnuCash, and I think that I have already asked for that in the "Uservoice" Feature Request Forum. I will check later to see if I have.

You have provided a thorough summary of issues to be aware of during the reconciliation.

I often have identical transactions (like Liz) that are commonly the result of buying the same sandwich at the same restaurant on different days.  The bank probably assigns a unique transaction number to each so that they should import correctly, but somehow that does not always happen.  I have not figured out why.  I do know that sometimes the import wizard matches incorrectly if one came in a previous import.  I have also seen totally unrelated payments to completely different payees mixed up by the import matcher if the amounts were the same.  In these cases the manually entered transactions are already present in the register.
I also have my own preference regarding whether to use the initial date or the cleared date in the register, and I wish there was an option to show and sort by either one, so that we could switch at will.

Technically, those are not reconciliation issues, but they do impact reconciliation indirectly.

I personally address the issue mentioned in your comment 3 by using my memory of my transactions and the predictability of my wife's transactions to accept 99 out of 100 transactions.  I do that during the import step because I need to check the import so carefully anyway.   

Your comments 4 and 5 are very enlightening.  I will experiment with some of your techniques when next month rolls around.

David C