[GNC] Found a bug, accounts gone haywire.

[G R Hewitt]

Good grief Adrien, I might have written that response. As a former
Finance/IT manager I was often looking for weird things in the accounts
using such protocols; when 8 people are inputting, things happen.
It's also possible that if .csv files have been imported, an errant comma
can throw a spanner in the works, as can spaces between figures.
I definitely recommend your suggestion of dropping the account data into a
spreadsheet, many processes can be carried out that can flag things up,
especially when you become 'number blind' looking.

On Sun, 6 Nov 2022 at 01:21, Adrien Monteleone <
adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:

> Before getting too far in the weeds with other possibilities, I'd
> caution to closely examine your accounts/transactions first,
> particularly if you can hazard a reasonable guess as to when you first
> saw the balance go awry.
>
>  From near that point, find a transaction with the allegedly correct
> balance, then do one or more of the following:
>
> 1. Carefully review transactions watching the balance to see anything go
> out of whack in one transaction.
>
> 2. Do a search on that account (from the Accounts tab) for any debit
> transactions over 600k, or the difference between the expected and
> report balance. (at least one transaction is large and backwards)
>
> 3. Reduce the amount searched for if nothing is found by half each time
> till you get one or more results.
>
> Odds are, at least one transaction has a decimal place wrong, or padded
> zeros and might even be in the wrong column. (debit vs. credit)
>
> If you regularly import transactions vs. hand entering, it is extremely
> likely you've got at least one errant import.
>
> If you can't find any candidate transactions, then try the following:
>
> 1. View the Account
> 2. Run an Account Report
> 3. Export or Copy/Paste into a Spreadsheet app.
> 4. Do a separate 'balance' column with your own formula.
>
> Are the results at each line the same as reported by GnuCash? (you can
> even set conditional formatting to check this)
>
> If not, then you likely found a bug, but otherwise, I'd bet you find
> your errant transactions that didn't show up in the above steps.
>
> Regards,
> Adrien
>
> On 11/4/22 6:09 PM, Michael Davis wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I just joined this group to report this problem. I’ve been using GnuCash
> for more than 15 years and I’ve never before had a problem with it.
> >
> > It does have more than 15 years of data in it, the file size is 2.4MB.
> >
> > When I opened it a couple of days ago, some of the accounts were messed
> up. For example, I’ve got a liability account for my credit card, the
> balance should be a credit of a couple of thousand. But now it’s a debit of
> over 600,000. Looking at the transactions, it starts at zero and adds every
> transaction as a debit, sort of like this:
> >
> >
> > debit | credit  | balance
> >        |         | 0.00
> > 10.00 |         | 10.00
> >        | 20.00   | 30.00
> > …
> >        |         | 621,245.35
> >
> >
> > Has anyone else seen this?
>
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