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

[David Carlson]

I think it is worth putting a procedure to reconcile 'backwards' on the
Gnucash WIKI.  Users who want to fill in old history in some accounts would
benefit.  I think your method would also be useful any time a historical
transaction has been accidentally unreconciled, perhaps even when
reconciling a different account in a split transaction.

I know that it is tricky, especially since the GnuCash reconciliation
process has not been designed to lend itself to do that.

I have personally developed a method to import old transactions into
accounts and reconcile them when having a starting balance as recent as
last year but I want earlier history  to be able to produce comparison
reports in a common format.  I am confident that this can be done without
needing to repeat every reconcile in chronological order, so I would love
to see your method.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2020 at 1:21 AM Jim DeLaHunt <list+gnucash at jdlh.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 
David Carlson