[GNC] What accounts should I reconcile?

[Paul Kroitor]

I use the reconcile feature in at least two other ways:

1. I keep current accounts with a lot of other parties -- four adult children, parents, in-laws, my sister's farm operation, our condo association, and at least a half-dozen more. Most of them don't do formal accounting and rely on me to know how much they owe me (or occasionally I owe them). Things go in and out in various ways, but either way they repay me (using Canadian Interac transfers, an email thing) item for item, or I print them a list of open transactions and ask them to pay me the balance. In either case the account should total zero, but because of timing it often doesn't actually come to zero (for example, when more debits are entered before their payment arrives).

In this case, some entries must be reconciled to zero, and it's often not trivial to see which. So I start Gnucash's reconcile and enter a balance of zero. Then I can simply tick off debits and credits that add to zero and I'm done. Much easier and more verifiable than manually changing reconcile status line by line.

2. For those of the above parties that do have their own formal accounting -- done, invariably, by me -- I have to reconcile my version of what they owe me with their version of what I owe them. For example, they might have sent 12 organic chickens over the last few months and I might have bought them a new microwave, phone battery, and furnace filters (they're not very technical -- I order these things for them with delivery there). For these current accounts I reconcile one against the other, starting from a situation where neither is complete. Easier to do than explain, but the idea is that you have two Gnucashs open side by side (one in a VM) and tick off matching entries, leaving entries only in one set of books. You enter those in the opposite books and repeat until everything is reconciled. Not the original intension of the system, but it's far faster than other ways I've tried (and I've been using variations of this for 25+ years).

Paul  

-----Original Message-----
From: gnucash-user <gnucash-user-bounces+paul=kroitor.ca at gnucash.org> On Behalf Of David Cousens
Sent: December 19, 2022 9:27 PM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: [GNC] What accounts should I reconcile?

Dave

Reconiliation requires an independent statement of the account (e.g. from the bank's perspective) against which to reconcile the account. You generally don't have that with an expense account. I have had to investigate discrepancies between  what I thought I owed a vendor and what they claimed I owed them which involved them supplying a statement of account detailing all purchases from and all payments I had made from them for a specific period against which I coud perform a partial reconciliation This wa s before the business customer /vendor reports existed

David Cousens
On Tue, 2022-12-20 at 01:21 +0000, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> For simplicity assume that I havé the following two accounts, all in GBP.
> 
> Assets -> Bank
> Assets > PayPal
> 
> I can reconcile those, and I find the process useful.
> 
> However, I noticed that it is possible to reconcile most, if not all 
> other accounts. Is there any point in reconciling the other accounts, 
> such as
> 
> Expenses > Office supplies?
> 
> 
> Dave

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