Okay, thanks for the clarification, now I understand better.
It's now past my bedtime here, but my own process for this would be to
try to set up the simplest possible sample account that exhibits the
aberrant behaviour and maybe post it here, or at least tell us how to
construct an account that fails it this way. At a minimum I would expect
to learn something from my play.
Have you tried this with other accounts? Does this happen with every
account you try to import, or only some?
Maybe try editing the file during the import to remove all but one
transaction, then import that into a test copy of your GnuCash file?
Perhaps try to establish if this is an issue with the basic balance
amounts vs one or more entries somewhere in the file that throw it out
of whack.
Sorry, those aren't great suggestions but they might help identify what
the problem isn't.
Paul
On 2026-03-02 8:41 p.m., Byron Bray wrote:
Hello, Paul,
Very basically, my problem is that, once having imported the data from Quicken
into GnuCash, the Starting Balance in the reconciliation window is almost
$1,000. I cannot get the account to reconcile (the Finish button is disabled)
unless I create a balancing transaction. If I create that transaction, the
running balance, from that transaction onward, is discrepant from my actual
balance by that ≈$1,000.
My current understanding is that can GnuCash derives that reconciliation
Starting Balance by summing the reconciled transactions in the register
regardless of date. If that is correct, it takes into account transactions
months or years after that opening-date transaction. So, unless I am missing
some better alternative (which I would be DELIGHTED to find out about), I am
faced with with either:
1) Accepting that the reconciliation numbers will never look right, even
thought the running balance in the account is accurate OR
2) Accepting that the running balance will always be discrepant by the amount
of the balancing transaction that the reconciliation process requires to
complete OR
3) Going through eh hundreds of extant transactions trying to find the
transaction(s) that total this sum and are causing this discrepancy OR
4) Un-reconciling the Quicken transactions, exporting from Quicken, importing
to GnuCash and then reconciling.
Again, I would be so delighted to find that I was missing something, obvious or
not, that would make a smother, quicker process possible. Please let me know if
that is the case.
Thanks, Paul, for your interest, time and energy. I appreciate it.
- Byron
===================
On Mar 2, 2026, at 5:18 PM, Paul Kroitor <[email protected]> wrote:
Although I consider myself quite experienced in both Gnucash (8+ years) and
Quicken (25+ years), I find myself somewhat baffled by this thread. Perhaps
senility has arrived.
Firstly, just in case I've got totally the wrong end of the stick, we are talking about the
"Opening Balance" transaction that's (generally) the first transaction in any asset or
liability account, right? I thought maybe you were somehow talking about the beginning balance of a
recon process, but that's quite sensibly called "Starting Balance" to avoid confusion.
My bafflement stems from the fact that I've never considered an opening balance
line (in either package) to be anything special at all (although Quicken
confusingly pretends to book it back against the same account, Gnucash normally
puts the other side against Equity, where it belongs). It's just basic
transaction at the top of a ledger to move the sum of everything that happened
before into Equity.
But in Gnucash, isn't it simply a transaction like any other? Some of the
dialogs / wizards may helpfully create it for you, but once it's there, I've
always thought of it as mutable in any way you like: change the description,
move it to later in the register, or change the amounts and it all works. So if
you don't like the opening balance it created, just change it. Or delete it and
add a new one!
Of course, this assumes one knows what the balance should be at the time the
books commence.
Or am I missing something? Is there some special or magic processing of opening
balance transactions I've never appreciated?
Paul
On 2026-03-02 7:34 p.m., Byron Bray 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 <[email protected]> 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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