Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Philip Tait <philip at taits.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 3:13 PM, DGPickett <dgpickett at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I had an account where I had been replacing reconciled transactions with
>> > copied more accurately split ones, and it was off even for the first
>> > transaction, which seems like a bug.
>> >
>>
>> The most likely source of the "bug" is that the replacement splits that
>> you
>> entered don't add up the same as the originals.
>>
>>
>>
>> > Since the imbalance must be coming from deleted reconciled transactions
>> > down
>> > the time line, I made a fake transaction with a very low date,
>> reconciled
>> > it
>> > using whatever balance worked and redated it way down the time stream.
>> >  Now,
>> > by changing that balance, I can get any reconciliation to work with the
>> > real
>> > balance of that date.  Once things are all reconciled again, I cannot
>> > delete
>> > that fake or they go off balance.
>> >
>> > There should be a way to zap the account back to all 'n' with $0 balance
>> > reconciled, so it can be re-reconciled.  I was sad to see repair did
>> not do
>> > this.
>> >
>>
>> I may be misunderstanding what you want to do, but you cannot have it both
>> ways -- I would think you you must either have accurate transactions OR
>> correcting transactions to make the balances correct.
>>
>> It sounds like you need to un-reconcile and re-reconcile ALL the
>> transactions from the point where you deleted and re-entered them so you
>> can find out where you made your mistake(s), rather than entering
>> correcting transactions.
>>
>
> Isn't that what he said above: "There should be a way to zap the account
> back to all 'n' with $0 balance
>  reconciled, so it can be re-reconciled."?
>

Well I took up the challenge -- I created a copy of a data file tried one
thing that did NOT work (but I believe SHOULD have):

I created a new bank account (in current assets) then deleted the old bank
account, and when GnuCash asked where I wanted the transactions in the old
account to be moved, I chose the new bank account I had created.
UNFORTUNATELY when I did that, the transactions showed up in the new
account still reconciled. :-(

The only thing I have found out that DOES work is to start at the top of
the register and click the "y," I told GnuCash I did want to unreconcile
but didn't want to see any more warnings about unreconciling for THIS
session. I pressed the Enter key to move to the next transaction. Then I
worked my way down the register, clicking "y" and pressing Enter. When I
got to the bottom of the screen it scrolled to the next line with each
Enter (I think you can change this in the preferences) but the
Click-Enter-Click-Enter process went through the entire register really
quickly.

 (All of this is using GnuCash 2.4.13, the current stable version.)

I never did find a way to un-reconcile a month or a register at a time, as
I thought I remembered. SO in this case, I recommend unreconciling the
transactions one-by-one, then re-reconciling against the old statements all
the way to the present to find and correct the errors in the newly-entered
split transactions.