[GNC] Reconciliation Changes
Chris Good
goodchris96 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 14 21:38:51 EDT 2021
Hi David T, Derek & Lisa,
David,
Thanks for pointing out that Lisa is doing "envelope budgeting". I have seen various references to that in this email list over the years but as I don't do any budgeting, I have not paid much attention to it. I can find no reference to that in the GnuCash guide or help manuals, perhaps as it seems to be a common method of budgeting, and as GnuCash is so flexible, it is assumed to be available and already familiar to accountants.
Derek,
"Forcing all splits of a transaction to have the same reconcile status is WRONG."
I agree. That's why my PR 713 https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/713
removes the functionality of automatically doing anything to the reconciliation status of other splits in the transaction for the account being reconciled (or it's subaccounts) when you change the status of a particular split.
Re my example in https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797648#c0 :
I end up with a transaction looking like:
Account Reconciled
------- ----------
Expenses:Misc:Person1 n
Expenses:Misc:Person2 n
Liabilities:CrCard:Person1 c
Liabilities:CrCard:Person2 n
Because after importing a single transaction which is payable by both Person1 and Person2 like:
Account Reconciled
------- ----------
Expenses:Misc n
Liabilities:CrCard c
I then split the expenses split into Person1 and Person2 so I can track the expenses for each person, and then split the CrCard split into subaccounts for each person so then the balance of the person subaccounts in the CrCard at month end (after subtracting credit card payments) shows how much each person has spent during the month.
Because I also split each savings account split into each person i.e.
Assets:Current Assets:Bank Acct1:Person1
Assets:Current Assets:Bank Acct1:Person2
When I pay the credit card, I do a transfer from
Assets:Current Assets:Bank Acct1:Person1 to Liabilities:CrCard:Person1
And
Assets:Current Assets:Bank Acct1:Person2 to Liabilities:CrCard:Person2
This way I know how much of the savings account and the credit card is attributable to each person at any point in time.
I end up with 1 of the CrCard splits being Cleared and the other Not Reconciled because I forget to change the split to Cleared when I create it.
I will note that I am not a control freak (as far as I know) but my wife, after a bad experience with a previous partner, wanted me to do this so she could track her own share of the savings and credit card accounts.
Possibly there are many more people doing envelope budgeting that what I'm doing.
The only way I can think to keep both camps happy is to have a reconciliation option say "Change all splits together" so both functionalities are catered for.
I'll look at that if it gets a reasonable level of support... or somebody has a better option?
Regards,
Chris Good
-----Original Message-----
From: Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com>
Sent: Thursday, 14 October 2021 10:53 PM
To: D. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com>; Steve Welch via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: [GNC] Reconciliation Changes
Chris, Lisa,
Yes, I agree with David here. It is absolutely quite common (and for DECADES has been the suggested way to do "envelope budgeting" in GnuCash)
-- to have subaccounts of your Bank (or other Asset) account for your budget items.
I realize that I did instigate your change in PR-713, however to reiterate my original message, "I do not agree with this change AND think it will introduce another bug" (emphasis added here). I still think the original change you made in PR-670 was wrong. But regardless, here we are now.
In your particular case in bug #797648 I (still) don't understand why this is a single transaction. If you are using two payment methods to two expense accounts, that to me is two transactions. They could be processed at different times, post at different times, and they are absolutely for different items. I don't even know how you can place such an order (well, except, I guess, if you're at a restaurant and order separate checks -- but even in that case I don't see why you need to enter it as a single transaction).
The use-case of envelope budgeting is definitely more common than your use case, so we should definitely support that. Perhaps I can propose some additional logic:
If *ALL* the splits in a transaction are within the Reconciliation account (sub)tree, then when you click on one, it should be as if you click on all of them. That would help Lisa's use-case of moving money from one envelope into another, or from the main account into an envelope.
However, this (new?) logic will not help in the case of a purchase where you're buying things from different envelope budgets in a single transaction (e.g. you're buying toothpaste and gas in the same transaction). I'm not sure how to get this and Chris' desire (and my
desire) together, because I feel they are all mutually exclusive processes.
I will just point out that in the reconcile window, all the splits of the same transaction will be next to each other, so if you're buying toothpaste and gas together, the splits for Assets:Bank:Checking:Toothpaste and Assets:Bank:Checking:Gas will be next to each other and should be easy enough to check manually (because they would both be credits in the same transaction).
-derek
On Thu, October 14, 2021 7:26 am, D. via gnucash-user wrote:
> Chris,
>
> I believe she's implementing envelope budgeting
> (https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-envelope-budgeting-1293682) using
> sub accounts. A fair number of users of Gnucash do this, which has
> been discussed on the lists over the years.
>
> David T.
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> From: Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com>
> Sent: Thu Oct 14 03:11:57 EDT 2021
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: [GNC] Reconciliation Changes
>
> Hi Lisa,
>
> This change was done under
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797648
> for reasons explained in the bug.
> The first fix went live in 3.9 which forced all splits in a
> transaction to the new selected reconciled state when one of them was
> changed, rather than just toggling the reconciliation status of all
> the splits for the account being reconciled.
> This was deemed incorrect, so a change was made in 3.11 where changing
> the reconciliation status of a split in a transaction had no effect of
> other splits in the transaction for the account being reconciled.
>
> I wouldn't recommend running an old version like 3.10. Never upgrading
> until you have to greatly increases your risk of falling foul of a
> security issue (or just a bug) that may have already been fixed.
>
> I don't upgrade immediately a new version is available, but I do after
> a little while so it is likely that any major problems with a new
> release will have been found and probably fixed.
>
> It seems unusual to create different subaccounts in a bank account for
> different types of expenses.
> I believe it is more usual to split your income and expenses into
> different income and expense accounts, and do your budgeting based on
> the totals of those accounts.
>
> Regards,
> Chris Good
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2021 20:31:44 -0700
> From: Lisa Reynoso <mrs.reynoso at gmail.com>
> To: David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
> Cc: DaveC49 <davidcousens49 at gmail.com>, Gnucash Users
> <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Subject: Re: [GNC] Reconciliation Changes
> Message-ID: <916D45E4-A319-4AB9-BFB9-FD7A6557F4C8 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Well, my computer reformatted, so I had to start over. But in almost
> two decades, I started over several times, and this last time is the
> only time this problem occurred. I can?t imagine that had anything to do with it.
>
> I?m going to look at an old hard drive I saved from a couple computers
> back and see if I have an old installation file and see what it does
> if I do.
> Or
> what happens if I import old files from years back (if they are still
> there). I?ll let you know how it goes.
>
> Lisa
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Oct 12, 2021, at 5:35 PM, David Carlson
>> <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> ?
>> Sub accounts under the same bank account are not the same as transfer
>> s to
> outside accounts.
>>
>> If I recall correctly, they must be of the same type as the parent
> account. I think that should still work as before in reconciliations.
> Were
> you able to import your table of accounts from an old file or did you
> start over, possibly different somehow this time?
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 7:18 PM Lisa Reynoso <mrs.reynoso at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> Okay, first, I don?t know what version I had before. It was about 2
>>> years
> ago that I downloaded it, and my hard drive was wiped, so I have no idea.
>>>
>>> Second, you completely misunderstood my problem. I understand the
> reconciliation process intricately; I?ve been using it for a decade
> and a half. I understand about clicking the ?include sub accounts?
> box; it?s the sub account feature that turned me on to the program,
> since I was doing that on paper as my mother did; a computer was so
> much faster, since it did most of the math for me. I like math, but it
> gets tedious entering numbers in a calculator. But I digress.
>>>
>>> There are two basic examples to illustrate. I have a checking
>>> account,
> divided into various sub accounts, such as gas, groceries, clothing,
> school bill, etc. When I deposit a paycheck, I split the deposit into
> various accounts. Likewise when i purchase both food and toothpaste at
> the grocery store; toothpaste doesn?t come from the food budget. When
> I want to reconcile the checking, I used to be able to check one of
> those splits and have them all highlight. So if I checked the
> toothpaste transaction, the grocery charge would check as well. Of
> course the expense account wouldn?t reconcile; I wasn?t referring to
> that.
>>>
>>> But the other example is when I transfer money within the checking
> account from one sub account to another. Like my original gas to
> groceries (or vice versa) analogy. In that case, when I would check
> the credit, the debit would check automatically as well, and the
> balance on the reconciliation would not change, because no money
> actually entered or left the checking. It was just moved around within
> it. Now I have to check one and then scroll down to find the other. I
> make several dozen of these transactions every month, and it is tedious to have to check them both.
>>>
>>> I downloaded version 4.4 when this problem first made itself felt. I
> downloaded 3.11 today, and it still doesn?t do what it used to. I have
> Windows 10; I don?t know if an earlier version will work or not.
>>>
>>> Lisa
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> > On Oct 12, 2021, at 2:09 PM, davidcousens49 at gmail.com wrote:
>>> >
>>> > ?Lisa
>>> >
>>> > It may help if you can tell us what the previous version was and
>>> > which version you have now upgraded to.
>>> >
>>> > On the reconciliation setup dialog under the Ending Balance entry
>>> > there is a checkbox "Include subaccounts" which AFAIK by default
>>> > is not checked. Try selecting that when starting the
>>> > reconciliation and see if that restores some of the functionality you are used to.
>>> > As far as I can tell once you have selected that option in the
>>> > dialog for a given account it remains in force for subsequent
>>> > reconciliations until you unselect it again but I am not
>>> > completely
> sure how sticky that option is and whether it does set a flag in the
> account structure.
>>> >
>>> > Any reconciliation process only acts on a single account and as
>>> > such only marks the splits of a transaction into that that account.
>>> > You do not reconcile a whole transaction unless you have
>>> > individually reconciled all accounts that the transaction has
>>> > splits to. Splits to an account which has not been reconciled will
>>> > generally be marked with a "n" ( and maybe a "c" in some cases)
>>> > and splits to a reconciled account with a "y". If a previous
>>> > version of GNuCash did do this then that behaviour was incorrect.
>>> > I have been using GnuCash for a similar period of time and I can't
>>> > recall any
> version in which a whole transaction not just the split was reconciled.
>>> >
>>> > David Cousens
>>> >
>>> >> On Tue, 2021-10-12 at 12:29 -0700, Lisa Reynoso wrote:
>>> >> I've used GNU cash for years. Like, over 15 years. I used it
>>> >> before I was married, so it's definitely been more than 15 years.
>>> >>
>>> >> Anyway, I never upgrade except when I get a new computer, and
>>> >> then I install whatever is the latest, and transfer the files
>>> >> from the old version (or in my most recent case, I just started
>>> >> over, because the computer reformatted without my
>>> >> permission--yeah, that was a nightmare!). When this latest
>>> >> install happened, something had changed about how the
>>> >> reconciliation works. Always before when I had a transfer from
>>> >> one subaccount within an account to another, or if it was a split
>>> >> transaction, when I would check one box in the reconciliation
>>> >> window, all boxes pertaining to that transaction would check. For
>>> >> example, suppose I had extra gas money at the end of the month, but had overspent my grocery fund.
>>> >> I could transfer from the gas to the grocery subaccounts, and
>>> >> when I reconciled, I could check one box and it would mark them
>>> >> on both the credit and debit sides, without me having to hunt for
>>> >> the opposite transaction. Likewise, when I deposit a check, I
>>> >> usually divide it among various accounts, and all I had to do was
>>> >> click one of the subaccount deposits, and all the other deposits
>>> >> from the same check would be marked as well. Now, that's not the case.
>>> >> And I can't find an old enough version for Windows 10 that does
>>> >> that anymore. Anyone have any ideas? It now takes almost twice as
>>> long
> for me to reconcile, since I have a lot of subaccounts and do a lot of
> internal transferring within my checking account that doesn't show up
> on my bank statement.
>>> >> Having to look for the parallel transactions or figuring out
>>> >> which split transactions go together takes more time. I'm almost
>>> >> ready to try to find some other software, but I've used this for
>>> >> so long I really don't want to switch.
>>> >>
>>> >> Lisa
>>> >>
>
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--
Derek Atkins 617-623-3745
derek at ihtfp.com www.ihtfp.com
Computer and Internet Security Consultant
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