Bank account balance incorrect after import from Quicken

[Tom Allred]

Thanks.  Yes, gnucash is completely new to me but I've been using quicken
(double entry) since 1995.  I'll read the new user stuff before making any
more posts but since a cursory look at the help table of contents didn't
address troubleshooting imports that didn't have warning messages but
changed account balances, and faced with 20 years of account data to sift
through, I didn't even have a starting point to begin investigating.  I'll
check out the equity account you mentioned.  Since the opening balance was
20 years ago, I wasn't worried about the data in the offsetting dummy
account being in the wrong place.  I mentioned the Reconcile column because
quicken allowed you to manually change it to "y" or "n" or "c".  Not good
practice but again, 20 years ago, so I didn't want it showing up in a
current reconciliation.  Still don't understand why gnucash would create a
transaction that offsets an account's opening balance, thusly making the
current balance incorrect, but maybe the documentation will explain that.
 
Thanks again for getting me past the initial hump,
Tom

  _____  

From: Geert Janssens [mailto:geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 6:16 AM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org; tallred7 at triad.rr.com
Subject: Re: Bank account balance incorrect after import from Quicken


 

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