[GNC] some of my reconciliations in 3.9 are completely bonkers

[David Reiser]

I have no problem with (A), except maybe if you’re using the gnucash posting date. A reconciliation resolves transactions based on the bank’s posting date, not gnucash’s. If I don’t enter March 31, 2020 interest until April 1, I’m still going to enter it in my account as having occurred on 3/31. But even that distinction can’t be causing what I’m seeing.

In my simplest case, my savings account was last reconciled based on the interest paid 1/31/2020. On 2/29 I received $0.96 in interest and on 3/31 I received $1.03 in interest. There were no other transactions during that time. I have no idea when I entered the February interest, but I did enter the March interest on 3/31/2020 (at least it was still 3/31 on the U.S. east coast).

When I click Reconcile, in the Reconcile Information dialog, I get:
Statement date 02/29/2020
Starting Balance $3024.39 (this amount was reconciled in gnucash 3.7)
ending Balance $3025.36  (reasonable, since 3024.39 + 0.96 = 3025.35)

Now if I click OK to get to the transaction check-off dialog, I get:

Starting balance: 375.15  (What???)
Ending Balance: 3025.36 (well, it remembered what I entered)
Reconciled balance: 376.11 (well, it is 375.15 + 0.96 …)

Difference: 2649.24 (the math is locally consistent, but the starting balance doesn’t represent anything in my register or what gnucash showed me on the prior screen)

Dave
--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com





> On Apr 1, 2020, at 1:19 AM, Christopher Lam <christopher.lck at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This is due to https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797640 <https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797640>
> 
> This change modifies the reconciliation starting balance calculator from Account->reconciled_balance to account->reconciled_balance on statement date.
> 
> The reasoning for this change is with the observation:
> 
> (A) if reconciliation is performed from a statement dated 31/01/2019, the starting balance calculator should ignore transactions posted later than 31/01/2019.
> 
> (B) subsequent work https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/667 <https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/667> aims to store past reconciliation ending balances and statement date. As a result we can re-reconcile any past statement.
> 
> (C) subsequent work will allow a sanity-check type report (illustrated in above PR)  which will compare account reconciled balances at previous statement dates, and highlight any discrepancy.
> 
> There have been previous feature requests to store and retrieve reconciled balances and reconciliation dates, and I believe it's possible and reasonable.
> 
> Having explained the rationale, the reasoning (A) may be incorrect -- please file in bug 797640 how/why starting_balance should include transactions posted after statement date. If reasoning (A) is invalid then we will need to revert the change, which means (B) and (C) above cannot happen.
> 
> On Wed, 1 Apr 2020, 11:48 am David Reiser via gnucash-user, <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>> wrote:
> My checking account reconciled fine.
> Then I went to two savings accounts and got completely off-the-wall results. When I first clicked the reconcile button, the dialog that comes up has the correct starting balance and the correct proposed to-be-reconciled balance. When I click OK to get to the transaction check-off dialog, gnucash has completely changed the starting balance to a much smaller number (and one that has never appeared in the account ledger) and thus presents an out of balance total that cannot be reconciled with the transactions that are in the account.
> 
> Dave
> --
> Dave Reiser
> dbreiser at icloud.com <mailto:dbreiser at icloud.com>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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