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

Sun Dec 21 10:03:06 EST 2025

Fwiw there’s a report specifically for this — the Reconciliation Report — but sadly it stopped working properly years ago. But it should still operate for simple issues like this one.

See https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=799312

Paul

> On Dec 21, 2025, at 9:26 AM, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
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