[GNC] Banking Account - Imported QIF data and Opening Balances

[Derek Atkins]

An OB transaction is just a regular transaction to Equity.  When creating 
an account there is a page to help you create that transaction, but you can 
manually create it afterwards if necessary.
However, once you reconcile, you cannot (easily) add a new opening balance 
or edit into the past.  The reason is thst reconciliation is always from 
"the beginning of time" to the reconcile date.

-derek
Sent using my mobile device. Please excuse any typos.
On March 2, 2026 19:36:50 Byron Bray <byron at up-and-running.net> wrote:

> David,
>
> Thanks for pointing that out; I should have been more specific. I had noted 
> that GnuCash does allow entry of an opening balance, when creating an 
> account; as you suggest, though, GnuCash creates the account during import 
> and, apparently, derives the opening balance as David T. points out, by 
> summing the import’s reconciled transactions. It does not provide, as far 
> as I have been able to see, any mechanism for adjusting or setting the 
> opening balance in that situation.
>
> I am going to try un-reconciling the account in Quicken, exporting it, 
> importing it into GnuCash and recycling to see how will work.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> - Byron
>
>> On Mar 2, 2026, at 1:01 PM, David Cousens <davidcousens49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> You definitiely can enetr a starting balance for an account Using the
>> New Account dialogue. It allows you to set the account paraeters an set
>> an opening balance. I'm not sure but it may be that the QIF import
>> creates accounts where necessary if they don't already exist in which
>> case there is no mechanism to set the opening balance.
>>
>> The process of manually creating an opening balance is described in the
>> giuide
>> https://code.gnucash.org/website/docs/v1.8/C/gnucash-guide/txns_puttoget1.html
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 2026-03-02 at 10:22 -0800, Byron Bray wrote:
>>> First, my thanks to you both for your replies; I very much appreciate
>>> your help.
>>>
>>> David Cousens wrote:
>>>> If there are no transactions dated prior to the start date of the
>>>> reconciliation other than your opening balance entry, then the
>>>> starting
>>>> balance when you reconcile the first month of entered data should
>>>> be
>>>> that opening balance.
>>>
>>> Thanks for that tip. I checked the filter, making sure that ”Show
>>> All” and all “Status" options were selected. I had performed the
>>> export from Quicken with transactions starting on January 1st for the
>>> year in question; double-checking showed that there were no prior
>>> transactions. Nonetheless, the Reconcile Information window shows a
>>> starting balance of almost $1,000.
>>>
>>> It seems so odd to me that you cannot simply enter an opening balance
>>> for an account. Then all subsequent reconciliations could proceed
>>> normally. I can see the logic behind the design; it was created on
>>> the premise that the user would be starting at the beginning, with no
>>> transactions and thus a zero balance. But that is not the case with
>>> imported data.
>>>
>>> At present, I can see no way to arrive at an accurate opening balance
>>> and reconciliation (and thus with accurate running balances, since a
>>> “balancing transaction” unbalances the running balance for all
>>> subsequent transactions) other than to go back to Quicken, un-
>>> reconcile all the transactions in the account, export the account,
>>> import it into GnuCash and, starting with an opening balance
>>> transaction, reconcile them all. I have many accounts; this was just
>>> the first, so it looks like a very long slog to make this transition.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> David T. wrote:
>>>> One correction: the opening balance in the Reconcile window
>>>> includes EVERY reconciled transaction in the register, regardless
>>>> of transaction date.
>>>
>>>
>>> I observed and was puzzled by this. I was also puzzled by the fact
>>> that the Reconcile window, when invoked for a particular month, shows
>>> unreconciled transactions for all dates subsequent to the
>>> reconciliation’s Beginning Date, including those after the Statement
>>> Date. I had intended to ask, at some point, whether there was a way
>>> to cause GnuCash to show only the transactions prior to the Statement
>>> Date. Based upon your reply, I doubt it.
>>>
>>> I am no accountant and that behaviour seems strange to me. After all,
>>> by definition, reconciliation takes place for a finite period; there
>>> may be transactions which pre-date that period (e.g., a check written
>>> months ago that has still not been cashed) but I can see no reason to
>>> include transactions subsequent to the Statement Date since they, by
>>> definition, have not occurred during that period.
>>>
>>> It also creates a real problem in a situation like mine. If the
>>> opening balance is the sum of all reconciled transactions, the
>>> discrepancy in these cases can only be found by going through months
>>> or years of transactions trying to ferret out that transaction (or
>>> combination of transactions) has caused it. Again, it points to the
>>> idea of unreconciling all transactions in Quicken, exporting,
>>> importing into GnuCash and reconciling.
>>>
>>> I had another question: I found that, in un-reconciling the
>>> transactions for that month, I could not un-reconcile more than one
>>> transaction at a time. The documentation, and many videos, etc.,
>>> indicate that I should be able to Ctrl-click (Windows) or Cmd-click
>>> (MacOS) multiple transactions in the register to create a selection
>>> to perform operations on but I could not do so. I tried doing so on
>>> both Basic Ledger and Transaction Journal views; nothing I have tried
>>> has allowed me to select more than one record at a time. If the
>>> Reconciliation window displayed both reconciled and unreconciled
>>> transactions for the reconciliation period, I could use the
>>> “Reconcile Selection” and “Unreconcile Selection” buttons to do this
>>> but, as mentioned earlier, the window only displays any unreconciled
>>> entries.What am I missing?
>>>
>>>
>>> Again, thanks to you both.
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>>
>> --
>> David Cousens
>
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