[GNC] Opening balances awry

[G R Hewitt]

May I respectfully suggest you do a back-up each day you alter anything in
your Gnucash file, preferably to a thumb drive as well.
I can't tell you how many times a back-up has saved my bacon, it can be an
irritation to do but well worth it in the long run.


On Tue, 22 Apr 2025 at 20:55, Jesse Ayers <jesseayers2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> John Ralls,
>
> Thanks so much.  After working at it quite a bit longer, I came to the
> realization you mentioned, that the starting balance in the reconcile
> window is from the last completed reconcile, regardless of which month the
> user is wanting to reconcile.  It was that opening balance figure that was
> throwing everything off.
>
> I did not understand about the statement date bug, but now that I do, I
> think I see how I can get back on track pretty easily.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Jesse Ayers
>
> > On Apr 22, 2025, at 1:36 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> 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
> >
> >
> >
>
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