There is no best reconciliation strategy. An appropriate strategy depends on exactly what you are using GnuCash for.
A business with a high number of transactions will have a need for relatively frequent reconciliation to detect errors, uncashed checks, etc. and to satisfy any internal and external reportingand audit requirements. In the case of personal finances, the frequency of reconciliation required likely depends on the complexity of your personal finances. Like Ken most of my transactions are cashless these days, and being retired a lot fewer than they were when I was working and running a business. Then monthly reconciliations proved to be both necessary and useful. Now I reconcile usually quarterly or even semi-annually. Like Ken I check my accounts usually on a daily basis for major discrepancies in the balances and for the automatically direct debited transactions that some websites sign you up for on the pretence of paying for a one-off (I do try to avoid them) and obvious bank errors, but my bank has a pretty good error rate (haven't found one in the past 5 years). One factor that may influence timing would be a bank's policies with regard to how long you may have to dispute errors and relevant regulatory legislation that constrains application of such policies so it is worth checking up on what those policies may be. On updating I prefer to stay up to date with the latest version of GnuCash. Most Linux distributions are often well behind the most recent version. If you lag behind, particularly across the major version boundaries updating can become a little bit more complex. There are very rarely any major problems with the core functionality of Gnucash in updates. The developers have done a very good job of making updates as painless as possible with procedures to update data files built into the update where necessary changes are made to the data file structure. I build GnuCash from the stable source tarballs on release. I did a little bit of minor work on some code areas in the past so building from scratch does not faze me but some users may find it more daunting, mainly in having all the necessary dependency versions and development headers available. David Cousens On Sat, 2025-01-18 at 21:06 +0000, arthur brogard via gnucash-user wrote: > i just keep personal books for the family. > my update and reconcile procedure works but is a bit tedious. I > can't think of any better way and I doubt there is one but i thought > it might be good to ask. > At sort of almost random times I decide to update the books. So I > download from CBA transactions from the bank accounts. > then I put them in a spreadsheet. in date order. > then I inspect and compare with a transaction report from gnu cash - > one for each account - and identify transactions not yet in gnu cash. > delete all but those from the spreadsheet. > sort on description. > attach a fourth column for target account. > import to gnu cash. > that's the update > balances should agree. that's the reconcile. > all that downloading, spreadsheeting, sorting blah, blah..... any > better way or that's just it? > > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > gnucash-user@gnucash.org > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
