On Chromeos / Crostini I run stable AppImage 5.1-3218 and for my checking account the reconciliation starting balance matches the ending balance.
If I load the same file into the development AppImage (e.g. master-4128) the reconciliation starting balance is very very different to the starting balance.
Same file - but very different starting balances calculated for my checking account. My Savings account the balances match. Does anyone know why this might be the case?
I would like to confirm/clarify some of your statements. Using the 5.1 appimage, if your starting and ending balance are the same - that implies there were either no transactions during the month or deposits matched withdrawals. Did you perhaps mean that the displayed starting balance matches the statement starting balance? Likewise, for the master version, do you mean the displayed starting balance is different from the statement starting balance? And - this difference is only for your checking account, but your savings account starting balances match (displayed and statement) with both versions?
The most common reason for differing starting balances is if you changed the status of any transaction dated prior to the previous reconciliation to or from Reconciled. (I believe the calculated starting balance is the sum of all reconciled transactions prior to or on the date of the prior reconciliation. (There should not be any reconciled transaction after that date.) Even if the calculation of the displayed starting balance has been changed, note that value doesn’t really matter to the reconciliation process. It is a display only value. As long as the displayed ending balance matches your statement, you are OK to finish the reconciliation. I agree it is confusing for the starting balances not to match, but I would be more interested if they don’t match next month - for the second reconciliation using the master version.
Thank you for your reply.
To clarify: using AppImage 5.1, I open my checking account and open the reconcile window. I always expect to see, before entering any data, that the same amount is in the starting balance field as in the end balance field - that is to say it is the cleared balance at the end of the last reconciliation. I then put into the ending balance field the balance from my new bank statement. I then set the transactions to ‘cleared’ in the ledger, reaching a difference of zero, ie bank statement and kmymoney account balance.
Now if I don’t ‘save’ the above file, so it is identical at the outset, but I open it in the master (development) appimage, open the same bank account and go to the reconcile window exactly as before, and before I enter any data, the starting balance and ending balance are not the same. The ending balance is as I would expect, the balance at the end of the last reconciliation as the 5.1 version, but the ‘greyed out’ starting balance is a figure that is completely different. The development appimage, I can only assume, is calculating the starting balance differently as the data file is the same in both cases.
Thank you for confirming that the starting balance is really only for reference and not critical to the reconciliation process and indeed using the development version I can carry out a reconciliation as usual and just as I would have expected using the 5.1 version.
I understand that the usual cause of this situation is that a transaction has accidentally been cleared or ‘un-reconciled’ but this is not the case here as the two appimage versions are using exactly the same file without any changes to the data.
I would add that the bank account that appears to have the anomaly has many transactions going back to 2015. My savings account with far fewer transactions behaves in the two versions as i would have expected ie starting and ending balances in the reconciliation window begin at the same figure. This probably has no bearing on the issue but I thought I’d mention it.
I cannot begin to think how the same data file can produce two different ‘starting balances’ in the stable and development appimages - but it does seem to!
With thanks for your interest.