[GNC] Accidentally unreconclied a transaction - how to mark reconciled again?

Sun Dec 21 09:26:14 EST 2025

IMHO< this means that either:
1) you reconciled to the wrong ending balance, or
2) there is a duplicate transaction in there that is reconciled to make it
balance out.

-derek

On Sun, December 21, 2025 8:51 am, Randy Orrison wrote:
> Hi Doug,
>
>
> On Sun, 21 Dec 2025, at 11:46 AM, Doug wrote:
>> I have had this happen a few times over the years. What I do is to not
>> panic, & clear the transaction at the next reconcile.
>>
>> If you reconcile everything but that transaction, the balance should be
>> the unreconciled transaction, so just tick it &
>> finish the reconcile. You can even use the last reconcile (where
>> everything was already reconciled), which should be sitting at the
>> unreconciled amount. Again tick & proceed.
>
> I've just reconciled my December statement.  The starting balance was
> correct, I ticked all the transactions on the statement, and the
> reconciled balance matched the ending balance on the statement.  This
> problematic transaction from months ago was still unticked.  If I tick it,
> then the reconcile windows says there's a discrepancy and won't let me
> proceed.
>
> It is an unusual amount, so it's easy for me to filter for all
> transactions across all my accounts for that amount - there are no others
> this year.  (In fact, the only other transaction for that amount was in
> 2012. That one is reconciled, and in an account that was closed a long
> time ago.)
>
> I have been using GnuCash since 2008, so I have encountered many instances
> of difficult to reconcile transactions where I've put things on the wrong
> date or the wrong account, but this one has me stumped.
>
> On Sun, 21 Dec 2025, at 11:05 AM, sunfish62 at yahoo.com wrote:
>> Or you could just delete the mystery transaction.
>
> I did just try that in a copy of my file... As expected, it created a
> problem in the savings account.  I re-created the transaction, and was
> able to re-reconcile my savings account and reconcile just that one
> transaction there, but then it's back in my checking account as not
> reconciled and I can't reconcile it.
>
> I've also just tried marking a different transaction as unreconciled, and
> that changes the starting balance when I try to reconcile the account - so
> that's not what happened.
>
> ...
>
> I have now managed to find it!  Here's how, in case it helps someone else.
>  I exported the transactions from my checking account to a CSV file -
> which includes the date it was reconciled.  With that I was able to filter
> in Excel to identify the transactions that were reconciled on the
> statement that included the mystery transaction.  I was then able to
> compare the transactions that I had reconciled against the original
> statement - I had recorded and reconciled that transfer in the checking
> account as two separate transfers on different dates from the wrong
> account (for reasons that made sense at the time).  When I later
> reconciled the savings account, I added a single transfer for the whole
> amount on the correct date - which created the transaction in the checking
> account that couldn't be reconciled.
>
> Thank you again for your helpful ideas!
>
> Randy
>
>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:35:26 +0530
>> sunfish62--- via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
>>
>> > If your starting and ending balances are correct without this
>> transaction included, then there's something wrong. Either the
>> transaction doesn't really exist, or another one of equal amount
>> (which has itself been reconciled) doesn't exist.
>> >
>> > Perhaps this transaction belongs in another account in your finances?
>> I've been known to have that happen, especially when auto fill kicks
>> in.
>> >
>> > The only way to truly figure it all out is to dereconcile back to
>> before the transaction in question and re do everything again, very
>> carefully.
>> >
>> > You could just leave it there until you figure out what it is.
>> >
>> > Or you could just delete the mystery transaction.
>> >
>> > ⁣David T.
>> >
>> > On Dec 21, 2025, 4:14 PM, at 4:14 PM, Randy Orrison
>> <randy at orrison.com> wrote:
>> > >Hi,
>> > >
>> > >I have a transaction in my checking account from a couple months ago
>> > >that I can't reconcile.  It's showing as unreconciled in the
>> register,
>> > >but when I mark it as reconciled while doing reconciliation, the
>> > >balance is off by the amount of that transaction.
>> > >
>> > >When I do reconciliation of statements on that account, the starting
>> > >and ending balances are correct, but that one transaction - which has
>> > >cleared through the bank and appeared on the statement for that month
>> -
>> > >can't be reconciled.
>> > >
>> > >I've looked to see if there's some other transaction on the wrong
>> date
>> > >for that amount, or perhaps it was entered into the wrong account, or
>> > >anything else, but there's no explanation I can see other than that I
>> > >accidentally marked it as unreconciled at some point and ignored the
>> > >warning.
>> > >
>> > >Is there some way to just mark it as reconciled, to correct the error
>> I
>> > >made by marking it as unreconciled?
>> > >
>> > >Thanks,
>> > >
>> > >Randy
>> > >_______________________________________________
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-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant