incorrect starting balance in reconcile

[Colin Law]

On 21 March 2018 at 19:22, darrylctx <darrylctx at gmail.com> 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.

Almost certainly you have (presumably accidentally) modified or
deleted a reconciled transaction or manually marked a transaction as
reonciled.

> 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.

As Dave suggested view the filter options to make sure you can see all
the transactions.

>
> 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?

It is almost always a mistake to start by assuming that a problem is
caused by a bug, particularly something as dramatic as this that would
be most unlikely to have gone unnoticed by the many thousands of
people who use Gnucash and have not seen the problem. Very
occasionally it will be a bug but more often the error lies between
the chair and the hands.

>
> 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.

I cannot remember a single instance where an error of this sort was
not caused by mistakes such as those I mention above.

Possibly the best solution is go back through your routine backups
till you find one the last one that does show the correct reconciled
balance and start again from there, or work forwards from there to
find what caused the error.

Colin