incorrect starting balance in reconcile

[Maf. King]

On Wednesday, 21 March 2018 19:22:10 GMT darrylctx wrote:
> I am trying to reconcile a Bank account.
> Everything has been working fine since I opened the account, but recently I
> tried to reconcile a statement, and the starting balance of the reconcile is
> incorrect.
> At the end of every statement, I put in a trxn with 0 value and the correct
> ending balance in the description so that I can quickly check the ledger.
> The starting balance had always matched the correct balance for the account
> on the next reconcile.  This time it did not.
> After reading through a lot of posts concerning incorrect starting balances,
> I decided to unreconcile all the trxns in the account and re-reconcile.
> After un-reconciling back the account open, when I try to reconcile the
> first trxn (amount = 0), the starting balance in the reconcile is not zero.
> There are no trxns before this one trxn I am trying to reconcile.
> 
> HOW CAN THIS BE?
> 
> It appears that GNU Cash is keeping a reconciled balance in the file that is
> no longer correct.
> 
> I can fix this with an entry to balance the starting balance and make a note
> that it is because of a bug in GNUCash, but this is very bad, as if anyone
> ever looks at the books, they will ask the legitimate question:
> 
> Can I trust a program that requires adjusting entries because of bugs?
> 
> Once all txns in an account are unreconciled, it should be possible to reset
> the starting balance for the account to the correct starting balance.
> 
> Based on all the related posts I've seen, this appears to be an ongoing
> problem.
> 
> Help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 

Hi,

the usual advice if the start balance is off is to just ignore it and try to 
complete the reconcile anyway. 

I believe that the most typical reasons for the start balance to be wrong is 
because a reconciled transaction has been modified in some way, or a 
transaction has been entered in the wrong year.

by going through the reconcile (which if it doesn't work out can be cancelled) 
there is a good chance that you'll see the mistaken transaction if it is out 
of register order.

AFAIK, the reconciled balance isn't stored anywhere, but is calculated on the 
fly when needed.

HTH,
Maf.