Wrong Begining Balance Prevents Reconcilliation

[Dorel Ciornei]

Thank you all for your feedback.Since you guys convinced me that there is no hidden evil spirit that changes the beginning balance, I went back and searched all the past transactions. I did find that 5 of them that were originally recorded 'backwards' which I fixed one by one, showed now as not reconciled.So I reconciled again with the date of my last statement that matched the balance between statement and GNU Cash, and now the new starting balance for the next reconciliation is correct.
Tommy... 
I loved your advise: "write into the description whatever curse words you're emanating at the moment," and I made a note of it.
I will definitely use this next time.:)
Thank you again


     On Wednesday, August 5, 2015 11:21 AM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
   

 
On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 4:32 PM, Dorel Ciornei <dorelciornei at yahoo.com> wrote:

I am afraid I did not explain clearly enough this issue.
I imported about three years worth of transactions from Quicken.On this particular account, they were already reconciled up to Dec. 31 2014 and they kept the 'reconciled' status after import.I am looking at the actual bank statement from let's say Dec. 31, 2014 and it shows a balance of $996.46.In GNU Cash register the balance on Dec. 31st is identical, $996.46,  and all the transactions to this point seem to be marked as reconciled.
Now I have entered more transactions and I am trying to reconcile again.In the Reconcile window I see the Starting Balance as some ($1300)... some add number.
I have only a handful of transactions to reconcile and they are correct, but there is now a Difference Between Ending and Reconciled totals, and because of it it's not letting me finish the Reconciliation.I can not go and change the Equity Opening Balance to bring it to zero because it would change the final balance on my register (which is correct as I showed).

Side note:
I noticed a handful of transactions from the Income Account that were imported 'reversed':They were payroll checks income that were split in several tax accounts and deposited in two checking accounts.On these few transactions imported backward, the income showed in the "Charge" column and the splits to taxes and checking showed in the "Income" column.I had to go and move by hand the transactions to the opposite columns, so it showed correctly.
It happens that one of the checking accounts where these were deposited to was the one I have issues with.I am sure there is a connection there, as by correcting the imported data, I changed transactions that were already reconciled.I am looking at that now.

I am afraid this is not any clearer either.:-(



Actually I think your explanation makes perfect sense.
Go back and re-read the instructions for the Reconcile process. For your convenience, here's a link: http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/txns-reconcile1.html
Note especially the first Tip:
> Tip> In the case when a previously-reconciled transaction is accidentally de-reconciled, you can simply re-reconcile the transaction along with the transactions on the *current* statement, and the result should balance.> > The case of accidentally deleting a previously-reconciled transaction presents more of a challenge; if you cannot determine what was deleted and restore it to the register, you will have to create a dummy transaction to get the reconciliation to finish.
[Emphasis added to the word "current," meaning whatever statement you're currently reconciling, not some past statement.]
This process has spelled out previously on this list in much more detail. Try carefully repeating the reconcile process. Have you given special attention to the specific transactions you un-reconciled to make sure their totals are still correct (you haven't created any new un-balanced transactions AND the splits increase and decrease the running totals in all the appropriate accounts)?
If these are your own books, one perfectly valid response is to say "**** it, it's not worth the aggravation!" Create a new "correcting" transaction within the period you're trying to reconcile. Label it clearly, write into the description whatever curse words you're emanating at the moment, whatever. They're your books, so do whatever works for you. Then select the new transaction in the reconcile dialog, click the Finish button, and move on. In the future, if you finally see the problem, AND you want to correct it, delete the correcting transaction, then re-reconcile the CURRENT statement (you can't really go back without starting over from scratch).



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