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

Wed Oct 2 06:39:10 EDT 2019

Sorry for the wordy reply. The TLDR; I think we're on the same page that
Balance Assertions are a "nice to have" but I feel I haven't really
articulated the scenario/s that I think make this feature quite important,
hence why I'm replying again.

> For example, if I enter a
> transaction from July 10, 2019 with the incorrect date of July 10,
> 2010,

This has actually happened to me before, where I'm backfilling some
statements and I get the years mixed up, but you could imagine it might
happen also if I'm punching in years on a number pad and write the wrong
value, or if the user is prone to mixing up numbers (also very common).

Now imagine that at the time of this error reconciliation has been done for
all months up to June 2019. 9 years worth of balances are now wrong, and
GnuCash will quite happily ignore the fact that I've told it on multiple
occassions what the balances should be at various dates (hence the missing
feature of balance assertions that you should "get for free" with every
reconciliation should you want it).

I think the premise of your responses is that I should now do a
reconciliation to find this issue.

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

(Remember that the transaction will appear on my reconciliation as well as
my statement, it's just that the date will be wrong, but I'll try to
respond to the core of the question - why would I sign off on something
that's wrong?)

Firstly I'd say that I shouldn't have to, as GnuCash has at this point been
given all the information it would need to point out to the user that there
is a discrepency (via the many statement balances I would have given it to
do the reconciliations up to this point).

Secondly, most of the time I think you're right in that I would catch this
issue in a reconciliation but I might not becuse:

- Many human errors are not random, but symptomatic of a cognitive bias.
For example, I might mix up 9s and 0s, causing me to type "2010" instead of
"2019". This would make me prone to missing this problem in reconiliation,
or
- I might be in a rush or might only check the balances. I might just
_happen_ not to check the year because I've been staring at dates all day
and I'm starting to get a bit frazzled.

Remember, I've already made the mistake by inputting the data incorrectly.
There's a good chance I'm confused about the dates at this point, so the
likelihood I'm going to stuff it up at reconciliation is larger than it
would be for other transactions. In the above example I got the balance,
day and month right, so there's literally only a single digit off!

But the worst part about this scenario is that there is no mechanism to
catch this down the road. If I make a mistake on the date in
reconciliation, that's it, it's there forever. Future balances will be
correct because only the date is wrong, and I'm now stuck with this mistake
forever, and can't know about it even though I've _told_ GnuCash the info
it needs to find the mistake.

It seems like there are several workarounds that reduce the likelihood of
this happening, such as exercising more diligence as Adrien points out, or
the various autocompletion features Liz mentioned. David's point about the
order of entries might also help. But all of these seem to only partially
reduce the likelihood of errors creeping in that really shouldn't be
allowed to exist in the first place.

I think as a software design philosophy the software really should be
making it as easy as possible to get it right. I don't dispute that we
should be diligent when reconciling values, but I think it's not ideal that
the normal workflow could result in permanent errors from a single mistake
(well, two mistakes I suppose, since you'd need to reconcile incorrectly,
but it's not out of the question as I've illustrated).

So it really wasn't my intention to come off as cynical, and I hope I
haven't done that - I'm actually hugely impressed by GnuCash and will
continue to use it regardless of whether it has balance assertions or note
(I'll just build it myself), but I'm hoping that I've succeeded in
articulating why I think it's a worthwhile feature (I know Adrien already
acknowledged this but I wanted to give a specific scenario).

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 19:49, D via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
wrote:

> Moreover, when next you go to reconcile, that entry for 2010 will display
> up at the very top of the reconcile window, and one might wonder at that,
> see the incorrect date and fix it.
>
> [Technically, Gnucash doesn't store the reconciled amount, it calculates
> it at each reconcile for all transactions with the reconcile flag set.]
>
> David
>
> On October 2, 2019, at 10:17 AM, Liz <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 16:19:10 +1000
> Arman Schwarz <armanschwarz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > For example, if I enter a
> > transaction from July 10, 2019 with the incorrect date of July 10,
> > 2010,
>
>
> That is actually harder than you think.
> If you do not specify a date, you get today's date.
> If you specify a number for the number of the day in the month you get
> this month in this year (put in 2 and get 2nd October 2019
> If you specify a number for the day, and a number for the month, you
> get this year.
>
> So the lazy entering of incomplete dates pulls you to the correct year.
> (I know this can be changed in preferences, somewhere).
>
>
> Nextly, the system does know the last balance at reconciliation. It
> pulls that value in for the next reconciliation.
>
> You can certainly type in transactions with no value, just a
> description, and in that description put "Confirmed balance $123.45"
>
> Liz
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