Registry Entry math error

Neil Knight nakinigit at gmail.com
Fri May 2 12:04:24 EDT 2014


On 05/01/2014 07:45 PM, John Ralls wrote:
> On May 1, 2014, at 6:54 PM, Neil Knight <nakinigit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I have a problem with 2 register entries in gnucash:
>>
>>    previous balance is $1,080.91, Check entered for $39.82. New
>>    balance, according to the register, is now $1,001.27.
>>    But 1,080.91 - 39.82 = $1041.09. How can this be? There are no
>>    splits, I only use one currency.
>>    Same problem with the next transaction: check for 20.28, written
>>    against the gnucash balance of $1,001.27,**new balance shows**as
>>    960.71 Again, 1001.27 - 20.28 = $980.99
>>
>>    It seems that in both cases, the amount of the debit was doubled.
>>    The total error is $60.10, and if I delete the offending
>>    transactions, that same error gets carried forward to the next
>>    transaction. Incidentally, all of my experimentation was done
>>    without ever saving the file.
> Could you elaborate on that bit? If you delete the transactions, the error gets
> gets carried forward?
>
> Is the running balance for the next transaction off by $60.10, or is it off by $39.82 and
> the next one after that off by $60.10?
After deletion of the 2 problem transactions, the running balance is off 
by $60.10, the sum of the 2 transactions. I agree, it does seem as 
though that there are splits that are not showing. I have done a search 
for the transactions, $39.82 and $20.28, but only come up with the 
original entries.
>
> It sounds to me like there are splits in the account
> that aren't displaying.
>
>>    The account has been reconciled years ago, and the start and end
>>    balances were fine back then. But something has changed, and it has
>>    taken me this long to actually identify the culprit. There have been
>>    no deletions of cleared transactions, other than my experimentation.
>>    My workaround has been to enter a correction of $60.10, but I can
>>    never mark that transaction as cleared, as it will screw up
>>    subsequent reconcilliations.
> So the reconciled balance is correct but the displayed balance in the register
> is off by $60.10? Still sounds like two splits have somehow become hidden.
Reconciliation has been working fine in the years since, start and end 
balances are just fine.
>
> What version of GnuCash are you using?
Currently, 2.4.12, on Ubuntu 13.04. It is safe to say that when the 
transactions were created, it was a release or two earlier. If there is 
a way to extract the version from the data file, I could retrieve the 
archives from the entry & reconciliation dates.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>



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