What is the practical purpose of reconciling in GNUCash?

[jdunham]

The main advantage to reconciling is that if you do find an error that you
can't figure out, you only have to search back to the last reconciliation. 
It gives an upper bound to the amount of work you have to do to resolve a
discrepancy.  If you never reconcile and the statement is does not match
your ledger, then you may have to search back through the entire history of
the account. 

Note this only works if you heed any warnings about not changing a
reconciled transaction.  If you ignore that, then all bets are off.

This is most helpful for checking accounts where you may write checks that
don't clear for weeks, and they clear out of order, and so your ledger
balance may never actually match your statement balance.  If you don't ever
reconcile and then you need to find an error it can get very tedious. 
Electronic payments where there is never any lag don't really exhibit this
problem.  I don't bother to reconcile my credit card accounts since the
ledger balances match the online statements after just about every
transaction




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