I had a case where a bank recently listed the same half dozen charges as both pending and actual. This was after the transactions had appeared a couple days ago as actual transactions, and I had entered them in hledger.
This meant some extra care was needed in reconciling my accounts. For one thing, I wanted to make sure that the pending charges wouldn’t be charged, as that would mean that I would be charged twice for the same items.
The bank seemed to have figured out the problem as a couple of days later, as the erroneous pending charges had disappeared. However, on the online bank page, the transactions were no longer sorted accurately by date. This made reconciling more difficult for me. That is, hledger correctly sorted according to date, but the bank didn’t. This irregular sorting must have had something to do with how they solved the problem.
As I attempted to do the next reconciliation, I ran into a problem when my reconciling total in hledger didn’t match the bank’s total. I first tried my usual strategy of comparing the bank’s and hledger’s list of transactions, both sorted by date. However, since the bank’s sorting was out of order, I quickly realized that this was not going to be as easy a task as it normally is.
Time to switch strategies. I subtracted the two reconciling totals to find the amount of the difference. Now, I went through the list of bank transactions to find ones that might explain the difference. For example, if the difference was $50, I could discard amounts that were greater than $50. (Note: this wouldn’t work if there were both charges and credits to the account, but mine were all charges, so no problem in this case.) If I found a possible hit on the bank list, I checked it against what I had already entered in hledger. If it wasn’t in hledger, I added it. Then I checked the two totals again, and repeated the above process until the totals matched.