[GNC] How can I add statement balances to my accounts as checks?

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Oct 2, 2019 w40d275, at 1:19 AM, Arman Schwarz <armanschwarz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Adrien,
> 
> I think it's the "if you aren't careful" part of the reconciliation philosophy that I don't like, but I think your message helped me understand the intended workflow with GnuCash.
> 
> Just to explain my first comment; Reconciliation seems to depend on the user checking that transactions are correct, and if a mistake is made, it's unlikely that it will be caught in future. For example, if I enter a transaction from July 10, 2019 with the incorrect date of July 10, 2010, then I will just have thrown off 9 years worth of transactions. If I happen not to notice this mistake during reconciliation (which is not unthinkable, since I made the mistake in the first place) then I'll probably never catch it unless I happen to reconcile old balances (which I'll never do).

No, you won’t throw off 9 years of transactions or 9 years of reconciliations.

Those are all correct. (presumably)

When you reconcile the *next time* you’ll see a 9 year old transaction that is listed as unreconciled. At that point, a mental red flag is supposed to be raised, and you should then pause the reconciliation and investigate.

*Note*, the reconciliation process is geared towards comparing a written bank statement with your electronic records.

WHY would you ‘clear’ a 9 year old transaction erroneously it it doesn’t appear on *this month’s* statement?

That would be entirely against the intended process. (hence my admonition to be careful, some might not understand it isn’t about just clicking things, it is about CHECKING things)

If you do a reconciliation RIGHT at worst you’ll have a discrepancy you don’t have time to resolve and thus have to make a correcting transaction. (or the time needed to resolve it costs more than the transaction, in which case, the principle of ‘materiality’ suggests to just correct it and move on rather than solve the problem, such as spending more than a few seconds finding a lost penny or nickel.)


> 
> The issue with "be careful when reconciling" is that if I could be so careful as not to make mistakes, I wouldn't need reconciliation in the first place. Well, that's not entirely true, I suppose reconciliation would then still be helpful in that it would catch mistakes made by the bank or some other third party. Maybe that's what I'm missing - that reconciliation isn't intended to catch user errors, just third party errors?

That is the entire point of reconciliation - to catch your earlier mistakes made in haste. (or otherwise, or someone else’s.) Reconciliation is NOT a rubber stamp process, quite the opposite.

> 
> Either way, balances are useful pieces of information that GnuCash is throwing away. I may end up writing a bash/python script combined with Christopher's suggestion to implement these assertions myself. If I do I'll post the result but I don't really have enough (any) expertise with GnuCash to know whether such a feature could be implemented in the software itself.
> 
> Anyway, thanks to both of you for clarifying for me.

Yes, noted asserted balances would be helpful as a feature. I’m not sure they should be enforced or trigger warnings, but it wouldn’t hurt to record them somewhere, especially since you’re inputting that info anyway.

Regards,
Adrien