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.
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
[email protected]
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.
