Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance

[David]

It makes it really hard to true up the books to look like reality with this hidden number rolling around in the reconciliation pile, from some mangled or deleted transaction.  I am not running a bank here, just trying to have a good record and status of accounts.

I had to redo my books, and in my haste to have working books, sometimes I had to put in a flat transaction to balance things, and later I replaced it with a proper split.  Sometimes the dates were way off by accident, and had to be changed.

 

 Since I did not find a workaround, I am pleased to make one and share it.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com>
To: David <dgpickett at aol.com>
Cc: clanlaw <clanlaw at googlemail.com>; gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Sent: Sun, Oct 27, 2013 2:37 pm
Subject: Re: Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance


David wrote:

>When I reconcile ....... change the balance to whatever the reconcile is off.
>
>It's a great workaround for an aggravating bug that the developers have adopted 
as their child that can do no wrong, just blaming the data entry troops and 
suggesting a search for an invisible needle in a haystack.  Well, in this life 
there is a little insanity everywhere.
>  
>
David, why am I getting the feeling that you don't know what the 
reconciling process is all about?

If you think finding the data entry errors is difficult with gnucash (or 
any other automated bookkeeping system) you clearly have no experience 
what it was like in the old days when in addition there were errors from 
transactions not entered in balance in the first place, transcription 
errors when posting to the ledger, or errors in arithmetic.

You haven 't heard of a bank teller or cashier taking hours to close out 
because there was an error to find, register not matching cash in drawer?

When your books don't match the bank's books (you are in the reconcile 
process) you don't solve that by entering a "correction" transaction 
except for certain special situations*. You don't assume your books are 
wrong and in need of correction! Maybe the bank has misentered* a check, 
and of course you first made sure you didn't miss the charge of a fee, 
an outstanding check, a deposit that didn't get recorded, etc. And of 
course YOU might have mistentered a check (wrote the check for one 
amount but entered another in your gnucash books).

In bookkeeping, if you made a data entry error then a correction 
transaction is the proper way to correct it. Easier to edit the 
transaction of course. But how could that be a reconciled transaction? 
You mad a mistake and the bank made the same mistake?

Michael

* Don't say never happens. I had to carry a "bank error" account for 
three months while a bank that had made a very small mistake in our 
favor by leaving the cents off a check had to get an executive level 
decision whether to correct it or give it to us (because we were a 
501(c)3). Notice that this affected only the transaction that eventually 
canceled out the "bank error" transaction.