Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance

David dgpickett at aol.com
Sat Oct 26 16:41:39 EDT 2013


Maybe I still have a mangled transaction in the future pile (a year of anticipated bills), and once I reconcile them all, I will not need my now future fake transaction.

It is like having a spreadsheet with hidden columns, one you cannot sort, one you cannot do bulk changes to.  Now, I know a ledger needs to be more stable and hard to accidentally change than a spreadsheet, whose great weakness is the fragile nature of the storage.  But there is no need to hide the additional values that make up the reconciled starting balance.

 

 The fact that I cannot reconcile my opening transaction because of some old transaction at a future date is silly.  Fixing it with a fake transaction reconciled and moved to the future is using the bug against itself.  People have been coming here to beg for help on this for years.  I provided it as a help to other victims, until the reconcile is made controllable and visible.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com>
To: Philip Tait <philip at taits.org>
Cc: DGPickett <dgpickett at aol.com>; GNU Cash User <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Sent: Fri, Oct 25, 2013 9:56 pm
Subject: Re: Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance


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.





More information about the gnucash-user mailing list