incorrect starting balance in reconcile

[John C]

You can use the Edit->Find menu item to search for entries by their 
reconcile status.

It might help you find an accidentally-inserted transaction.


On 3/22/2018 8:43 AM, Colin Law wrote:
> 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
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