[GNC] Would anyone else like a hacky way to do partial and catch-up reconciliation?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hello, Gnucash users:

Would anyone else like a hacky way to do partial and catch-up 
reconciliation of bank accounts and credit card accounts?

I am a bad bookkeeper. In my personal finances, I have several GnuCash 
accounts with 10-15 years of transaction history, but I did not 
reconcile them properly against my statements for all those years. 
Recently, I have been doing better. I looked for a way to reconcile just 
this year's transactions for now. Then I want to reconcile new 
statements as they arrive, and work on reconciling last year's 
statements as i have time. Gradually I want to work backwards in time to 
reconcile and correct as much of the history as I can. This will let me 
do better budgeting etc.

Unfortunately, reconciliation in GnuCash is set up to start from the 
beginning of a book account, and to work forward. In fact, the GnuCash 
Guide, 2.9.4. *Reconciliation* 
<https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/chapter_txns.html#txns-reconcile1>, 
says: "Warning. It is important to understand that reconciliation is 
done for a given date, and when you reconcile an account based on a 
statement from a given date, you are reconciling all transactions prior 
to that date. Therefore, if you add or modify transactions that predate 
your last reconciliation, your reconciled balances will be thrown off."

But I think I have found a way to do catch-up reconciliation, starting 
with the recent past and working backwards. It's a hacky, unconventional 
approach. It involves adding 3 transactions to adjust balances and net 
out errors in the un-reconciled past. I wrote down my procedure, and the 
instructions are about 4,000 words. But it works.

Is there much interest in my sharing this approach?  If there is, I 
might put my instructions on to a wiki page. If not, I'll just publish 
it on my blog or something.

For those of you whose books are up-to-date and fully reconciled, I 
admire you. Best regards,
       —Jim DeLaHunt, software engineer, Vancouver, Canada