Bank account balance incorrect after import from Quicken

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 01 September 2015 04:46:24 Tom Allred wrote:
> Pretty close!  Apparently during the import process an
> offsetting/reversing transaction was automatically created by gnucash
> for the opening balance entry.  The Reconcile column was "n" for this
> entry.  I figured if I just deleted that entry then all would be well
> but I was wrong.  I got a warning that the entry was part of a split
> reconciled transaction.  When I deleted it anyway it also deleted the
> actual opening balance reconciled entry which left me with the same
> incorrect current balance.  I created a new Opening Balance
> transaction which I offset to a dummy account and that made the
> current balance correct.  It won't let me mark it as Reconciled so I
> don't know what that means for down the road.  I'm assuming gnucash
> also made automatic offsetting opening balance transactions for all
> my accounts but I haven't checked yet.  Leaves me concerned for what
> other gotchas gnucash might have left lurking in the accounts that
> are going to mess me up later. Thanks,
> Tom
> 

Hi Tom,

I have never used the importers myself so I won't comment on what it did and why.

>From what you write it seems to me you may not be fully grasping the double entry nature of 
gnucash. (You may also just not have mentioned everything you did for brevity, in which case 
feel free to ignore this).

You should not offset an Opening Balance transaction to "some dummy account". Instead it 
should be offset to an equity account. Gnucash' default charts of accounts comes with an 
"Opening Balances" equity account which you can use for this.

As for reconciling: in gnucash you reconcile an account at a given date, not a single transaction. 
So you should be able to run the reconcile command on the account and that should allow you 
to mark the opening balance transaction as reconciled. Note that in the reconcile window you 
should generally only edit the end date and the final balance, not the beginning balance. Some 
people have had trouble with it because they wanted to edit the beginning balance as well.

Lastly, did you already read our tutorial and concepts guide [1] ? It will help you get started 
with the basics and solves many newcomer issues.

Regards,

Geert

[1] http://www.gnucash.org/viewdoc.phtml?rev=2.6&lang=C&doc=guide