What is the practical purpose of reconciling in GNUCash?

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 12 12:12:20 EST 2016


> On Dec 12, 2016, at 9:08 PM, Kevin Reid <kpreid at switchb.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 6:26 AM, replicon <replicon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> It seems to me like nothing but a feel-good blue line that makes it harder

The blue line actually delineates past transactions from future ones, actually.


>> to refactor your CoA later (e.g. suppose you suddenly want to know how much
>> you've been spending on coffee every day, so maybe you want to create a
>> subaccount under expenses and move all "coffee break" transactions in
>> there). Or just in general, if I want to move accounts around, or
>> whatever...
> 
> 
> *Reconciling does not interfere with this type of reorganization* in the
> usual cases.
> 
> The reconciled status is per-split, not per-transaction. For example, if
> you have a transaction between *Liabilities:Credit Card* and
> *Expenses:Dining*, and you regularly reconcile the *Credit Card* account
> but never the *Dining* account, then you can freely change the split
> referring to *Expenses:Dining* to use *Expenses:Coffee Break* instead and
> GnuCash will not object.

Actually, GnuCash *will* display a warning that you are changing a reconciled transaction, even if you are not modifying the split that is reconciled. The end result is the same, however, the reconcilled portion will not be affected.

> 
> (Reconciling the expense account *will* interfere, but as others have said,
> there's no reason to do that.)

At some point in the past, someone noted a situation in which one might reconcile an expense account when one was in the habit of filing expense reports for reimbursement. One could use the reconcile feature to track the staus of the reimbursement process (or something like that). I never did it myself, though.

> You can also freely rename or re-parent an account with reconciled
> transactions.
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