[GNC] What accounts should I reconcile?

[Christopher Lam]

These are nice examples but I think are still formally assets and
liabilities. e.g. I buy dinner for myself and sibling

Asset:Bank -$50
Asset:Sibling $25
Expense:Restaurant $25

Later hopefully sibling pays back

Asset:Sibling -$25
Asset:Bank +$25

The original question was IIUC about reconciling Income & Expense accounts.
It's perfectly fine to reconcile expense accounts, e.g. we could reconcile
the Expenses:Fuel against Fuel card statements.

FWIW the first example (temporary loans, or suspense accounts) aim to have
zero balance, and there's upcoming work to better highlight them.
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/1480 -- the highlight is a warning
to show the balance is outside a user specified range. It can also be
useful to highlight e.g. credit card or HELOC balance is exceeding a limit.

On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 at 11:53, Paul Kroitor <paul at kroitor.ca> wrote:

> 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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