[GNC] Partial use of reconciliation -- RESULTS

[Stan Brown (using GC 4.14)]

On 2025-04-26 21:26, sunfish62 at yahoo.com wrote:
> Stan, 
> 
> Glad you worked this out. I'll note that it sounds as if you did all
> this in the register, based on your talking about setting the field to "c."

You're right, I was in the register, in basic view. So I'd click the "n"
on each line, then hit the Enter key. It went pretty quickly.

> I'll note that if you were to use the Reconcile feature in GnuCash, you
> would find an interface that simplifies the selection of transactions to
> be reconciled. It would also make it easy to locate discrepancies of the
> sort you mentioned. 

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I did try the Reconcile interface
initially; that's where I got the > $1,000 discrepancy. If you say it's
easy to locate those discrepancies, I'll believe you, but I didn't have
a clue how to do it. (I did check for Orphan or Imbalance entries, and
there were none.) Maybe this is a deficiency in 4.14 that has been fixed
in 5.x?

> Finally, were you to complete that process, GnuCash
> would set the Reconcile field to "y" for all those transactions, and the
> program would prompt you before allowing you to edit any of them in the
> future. It's an added assurance that past transactions stay the way you
> want them. (Note that this can be overridden)

Yes, I've picked up on that from reading the mailing list. I like the
idea in principle, but in 7+ years with GC I've never accidentally
edited a past transaction.

Rightly or wrongly, I don't see what full reconciliation would buy me in
the way I work. Not saying the features are valueless: I'm unusual in
that I don't wait till the end of a statement period to reconcile. I get
an alert from every bank account and credit card whenever there's a
credit or debit, and I'm pretty rigid about entering the appropriate
transactions. Here again, what _will_ help me is not cleared versus
cleared. For most transactions, the notification from the bank or card
company comes very promptly, and I enter the transaction and immediately
mark it cleared. But sometimes a vendor delays communicating the
purchase to the processor, and in such cases I enter the transaction
leaving the status at the default n, then change it to c when I get the
belated notice. (The same applies in my checking account, when I
schedule a funds transfer or bill payment for a future date, or a vendor
is slow to deposit my check.)

> Should you wish to have that result, you can rather quickly take your
> accounts now, click the Reconcile button, accept the defaults, and
> (assuming the numbers actually match)

Unfortunately that assumption was not met. My records match the banks,
but the Reconcile screen isn't happy.  I'd pursue it if I thought it
worth my while, but for the admittedly unusual process that I follow, I
think just cleared/not cleared is what I need.

> click finish in the ensuing dialog
> to change all transactions to "y." Then future reconciliations could be
> done against statements on a regular basis.

Above, I've tried to explain why per-statement reconciliation isn't as
useful to me as it is to most people. Because I enter everything the
same day, surprises at the end of the statement period are quite rare,
and not hard to fix when they do occur.

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com