Registry Entry math error

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Fri May 2 13:14:02 EDT 2014


On May 2, 2014, at 9:04 AM, Neil Knight <nakinigit at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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.

2.4 is close eonugh, even if the original transactions are old enough to have been from 2.2. I was actually expecting 2.6.0, because there was a bug that hid single-split transactions.

What about the counter-accounts (Expenses:something-or-other, I imagine)? Are they similarly out of balance, or do the hidden splits show up?

Would you be willing to send me your account file directly, i.e. not to the list?

Regards,
John Ralls


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