[GNC] Opening balances awry

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 22, 2025, at 09:17, Jesse Ayers <jesseayers2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?

I think you mean starting balance in the reconcile window, not the first Opening Balance transaction in the account register.

There is a bug in 5.10, fixed in 5.11, that causes a postponed reconcile date to not be cleared so that the proposed reconcile date when you start a reconcile is the old postponed date instead of today (if you have that preference set in Preferences>Register) or the computed next statement date. The fix in 5.11 will still present the postponed date but when you override it when doing a new reconcile the postponed date is cleared and future reconciles will present the expected date. That’s probably what happened with the accounts you were able to reconcile.

The starting balance is the balance of all reconciled transactions. It reflects your last reconcile regardless of the date you or GnuCash enters for the statement date, meaning that the only way to repeat November’s reconcile is to un-reconcile all of the transactions back to before the November statement's end-date then re-reconcile it ignoring the starting balance and checking only the unreconciled transactions that are on the statement. Does the starting balance match the last (March?) statement’s ending balance? If not, look at the starting balance in backup files to see when it last matched. That might be before the March statement if you messed up the March reconcile.

Regards,
John Ralls