Where does the Reconcile Information->Starting Balance get its number from?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Aaron Laws <dartme18 at gmail.com> writes:

> For what it's worth, I understand that number to be a sum of the
> "Reconciled" splits to date. That's different from the last reconciled
> balance if transactions have been marked unreconciled (or, heaven help us,
> reconciled) outside the reconciliation process since the last
> reconciliation.
>
> William, as you probably know, you're right to investigate this and get it
> right to avoid balancing entries.

I don't believe it computes it to the last reconciled date; I believe it
computes it based on *all* reconciled transactions in the account (and
subaccounts, if that's included).  It wouldn't use the date per-se
because reconcile always happens forward in time; there is no way to
reconcile "in the past", so it can safely assume that all reconciled
transactions happened "in the past".

The starting balance can be off due to a few reasons:

1) incorrect reconciliation in the past
2) a reconciled transaction was accidentally marked unreconciled
3) a reconciled transaction's value was accidentally changed
4) a reconciled transaction was accidentally deleted.

#2 is easy to solve; just ignore the starting balance, reconcile to the
correct ending balance, and be sure to include the accidentally
unreconciled transaction in the new reconciliation.

For #1, it depends on what was done incorrectly.

#3 and #4 are harder to solve because you need to figure out what got
changed.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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