[GNC] Opening balances awry

[Jesse Ayers]

I am a long-time Gnucash user.   Most recently I have been using GnuCash 5.10.  Upgraded today to 5.11 after running into the following problem.

The opening balance on one of my bank accounts is off thousands of dollars.  Also, when opening the Reconcile Window, instead of the pre-filled “Statement Date” being the date of the current statement, Gnucash is backing up 4 months to November 2024 as though those months have not been reconciled.  It is doing this in all accounts.

With most of the accounts, I simply manually entered the correct statement date, and could proceed with reconciliation without a problem.  But for one account, it has  bizarre opening balances thousands of dollars off.

I have looked back through the account’s ledger, and all previous transactions are checked off as reconciled.  I have looked back for any strange, big dollar transactions that might have been entered through error.  All appears fine.

I tried working backwards in the Reconcile window, backing up to November 2024, and then further back, and all opening balances are bizarre.  (Yes, I have restarted the machine just in case that would help, but it did not.)

So, since GnuCash thinks I should be reconciling November 2024 (for which it, too, has an opening balance off by thousands of dollars), I have tried re-reconciling November and used the Balance function in the reconcile window to enter an adjustment to bring November into balance.   But then when I repeat the process for the following month, December, the opening balance is correct, the correct closing balance, there are no unreconciled transactions, but it is out of balance by thousands (but a different errant amount than November).  So, I used the Balance function once again.  Then January is off as just described.  

I can see no rhyme or reason to the monthly amounts it is out of balance (I was looking for a key figure that is a constant in some chain of errors).

I am thinking that perhaps when I upgraded to 5.10 a while back the new version did something to corrupt my data, but all of the individual transactions for all accounts are correct as entered; it is only the opening balance and the next statement dates that are off.

I hate to think of going back to a backup file from several months ago and hand entering all the transactions.

Any ideas?

Jesse Ayers