>Greetings,
>
>I have about 4,000 inventory distribution records that are to post to various GL accounts. Out of those 4,000 records they are out of balance a very small number... Let's say $590.12.
>
>The critical data structure is ultra simple:
>

>Account        Amount
>11999-000     $120.40
>11999-000      $40.12
>11999-000      $12.22
>20100-000       $1.90
>20100-000     $902.00
>50000-000    -$200.01
>50000-000    -$100.71
>50010-000   -$1401.20
>...data continues for 4,000 records
>

>
>This is just arbitrary data but is serves to illustrate the problem. There are thousands of entries but just a handful of accounts. I'd like to come up with a routine that could assist in first off identify which account is off (I can do that easily enough); more importantly I'd like to identify which transactions could possibly total up to the out of balance amount. I expect it's possible there could be more than one and perhaps several combinations that could total the out of balance amount.
>
>As I started to bang out this code I realized there maybe someone on here may have already had this problem or would be able to think of a clean way to accomplish this. I imagine it will be useful in the future under similiar circumstance.

I wrote something like that ages ago, which primarily consisted of binding transactions which cancel each other into bundles (i.e. marking them with a number). I had a counter field in each account record, and basically pulled unbound transactions for each account, then sorted them in various ways (by date posted, by date when they supposedly happened, and by absolute value of the amount. In each of these three passes, if at some point the total zeroed out, I'd go back and mark each of the transactions with the next bundle number for that account (and update the counter in the account record).

Then in the end I'd have a report on unbound transactions - which, in my case, was bills unpaid, or payments on less than all bills (cases when there were 5 invoices, 4 paid), or rounded-up payments and such. I also had a procedure where they could bind them manually - grid with unbound transactions, checkbox for each, bind them as you like.

The whole thing was actually necessary by the then accounting laws, as anyone doing business with anyone else had to send a report on unbound transactions - and the accountants were wasting tons of hours doing that manually. They loved me for this :).