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.
