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Opening

You can find your account opening balances on a trial balance report, a balance sheet or a profit & loss report prepared for the period immediately prior to your conversion date. You can ask your accountant to prepare these reports. You may also be able to find your account opening balances using your previous accounting software or paper-based records.

A note about bank account balances

You can enter the following amounts as the opening balance of a bank account:

the bank account balance that appears on your balance sheet or trial balance reports as at the day prior to your conversion date. For example, if your conversion date is 1 July, this is the bank account balance as at 30 June.
These reports can be provided by your accountant, or, if you were previously using other accounting software, printed using that software.
the cashbook balance of the account as at the end of the day prior to your conversion date. You can calculate your cashbook balance by taking into account the transactions not yet cleared by your bank as at the conversion date and the balance that appears on your bank statement at that date.
For example, assume that $500 worth of deposits and $1000 worth of payments were uncleared as at your conversion date (that is, they had not appeared on a bank statement). The cashbook balance would be calculated as shown below:

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Account opening balances are the balances of your accounts as at the first day of your conversion month. ( You selected the conversion month when creating you created your company file. This , and it can't be changed. )Check your conversion month via Setup menu > Company Information > Conversion Month.

If you were in business prior to your conversion month, most of your accounts probably already have balances. If you want to To produce financial reports that include these balances (such as a balance sheet), or you want to track the balance of accounts with a cumulative balance (such as your bank account), accounts, inventory, receivables and payables, you need to enter these balances.

You can find your account opening balances on a trial balance report, a balance sheet or a profit & loss report prepared for the period immediately prior to your conversion date. You can ask your accountant to prepare these reports. You may also be able to find your account opening balances using your previous accounting software or paper-based records.Take a look at this quick overview of opening balances:

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Invite your accountant or bookkeeper to help you

If your company file is shared online and you want your accountant or bookkeeper to help you with this task, invite them to work online. See Add a user.on your file.

What to enter

The balances you enter depend on whether your conversion month is also the first month of your financial year. If your conversion month:

is the first month of your financial year, you enter the opening balances of your asset, liability and equity accounts only.
is not the first month of your financial year (for example, if your financial year starts in July but your conversion month is September), you can enter the opening balances of all your accounts.

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Bank statement balance as at the conversion date

$21,000

.00

ADD uncleared deposits + $500

.00

SUBTRACT uncleared payments – $1,000

.00

Cashbook balance as at the conversion date = $20,500

.00

If you're using the sales and purchases features in AccountRight, you need to enter both your account opening balance and the individual balances of your outstanding sales and purchases. These transactions are also known as pre-conversion or historical sales and purchases.

If you track the quantities you buy and how much you sell, you need to enter both your inventory account opening balance and the balances of your stock items.

Go to the Setup menu, choose Balances and then Account Opening Balances.
The Account Opening Balances window appears.

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Enter the balances in the Opening Balance column.

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To enter opening balances

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Enter opening balances as positive numbers

Don’t, for example, enter your liability account balances as negative numbers. Enter negative amounts only if accounts truly have negative balances. As a rule, these will be asset accounts that record accumulated depreciation.

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Check that the amount in the Amount left to be allocated field at the bottom of the window shows $0.00. If this field displays an amount other than $0.00, check your opening balances again because they are either incomplete or incorrect.
However, you can continue the setup process if there is an amount in the Amount left to be allocated field. The amount will be assigned to a special equity account called Historical Balancing.

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About historical balancing amounts

A frequently-used financial report is the Balance Sheet. It lists everything your business owes and owns, and the net amount equals your real share of the business (equity). This is commonly expressed as: Assets less Liabilities = Owner's Equity. If when entering your opening balances, you don't enter all the figures, or there's an error in one of the balances, then the Balance Sheet won't balance. To overcome this temporary issue, AccountRight enters the balancing amount in the Historical Balancing account. When you eventually enter all the asset, liability and equity amounts (or find the incorrect values), the Historical Balancing account's balance will return to zero.

So if you're seeing an amount in the Historical Balancing account, don't panic. Just check that you've entered all the assets, liability and equity balances correctly as at your conversion date. You might find it helpful to compare the balances you've entered with a balance sheet provided by your accountant, dated as at your conversion date.

Click OK.

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