? Corruption of reconciliation history

[Michael Hendry]

On 10 Apr 2013, at 16:42, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> You're absolutely right, David. I hadn't gone through the account
>> checking the running balance, and doing so has allowed me to correct a
>> couple of faulty transactions and restored sanity! By extraordinary
>> coincidence, one of the offending transactions was dated 31/12/2012!
> 
> For the curious:  what exactly were the discrepancies that you found?


The reconciliation was out by £1509.57.

The 31/12/2012 transaction I mentioned above had simply been deleted between the last good file and its successor. It related to an online banking transaction, transferring £1000 to a credit card account to avoid a transgression of my credit limit. If I remember rightly, this transaction was the only one recorded on that day, although I would probably have checked for its effect on the bank account and on the credit card account before closing GnuCash. 

Working back from the 31st Dec, the two registers were out of step by £509.57 right back to the opening balance in the account when I first started using GnuCash on 1st April 2010. After I bought my iMac in January, I ran GnuCash in parallel on OSX and Ubuntu. When I found that the February reconciliation worked on the Ubuntu machine and didn't on the Mac, I checked the two, transaction by transaction, and couldn't find the difference. In order to be allowed to complete the reconciliation, I increased the Opening Balance by £509.57, documented the adjustment in the Memo field, and then forgot about it.

What strikes me as odd is that the need for the Opening Balance adjustment seems to have gone away spontaneously, and the fact that a reconciliation took place on the 5th of Feb hadn't been recorded in the GnuCash file saved on that date, although the relevant transactions had been marked as reconciled.

To cut a long story short, I shot myself in the foot, and was only saved from destroying my whole leg in thrashing around for a solution by sensible advice from the list.

Michael

> 
>> Many thanks to you, and to all the others on the list who've helped me
>> keep a cool head and avoid trampling about causing even more damage.
>> 
>> Three cheers for the spirit of Open Source Software, and the
>> philosophy of support that goes with it!
>> 
>> Michael
> 
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 
> -derek
> 
> -- 
>       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available