Detailed Opening Trial Balance Procedure

When entering in your Opening Trial Balance and you have values in Accounts Payable, you must create a Clearing Account for this first.

Once the clearing account is created, you will enter in your Trial Balance and hit this Clearing Account instead of your regular Accounts Payable account. 

1. Create 1 new Clearing Account
   • Name it “Clearing – Accounts Payable”
   • Set it as an Expense account type
   • Give it an account number like 9999 and 9998.
2. Enter in your full Trial Balance (Accounting>General Journal>New)
   
   
3. When you reach the AP line item, be sure to enter this amount in the Clearing account you just created.
4. Save your full Trial Balance once completed.
   
   
5. As it stands, your AP balance is now entered in account “Clearing – Accounts Payable”. You now need to tie in your AP Clearing amount to actual vendors & invoices and into your true AP account.  To do this, complete the following:
   • Go to Enter Bills.  Use your regular Accounts Payable account in the “A/P Account” field of the bill
   • In the grid where you typically set the expense account, you will select the “Clearing – Accounts Payable” This will credit A/P, and debit the Clearing expense account
   • If a vendor has a credit, you will have to select the Credit radio button when entering the bill.
     
     
6. If done fully correct, your “Clearing – Accounts Payable” account should now be at $0.00. Also, your AP Aging Summary should now be populated accordingly. 
   
   
7. On the AR side of things, the AR balance needs to be associated with Owners/Units. To do this, complete the following:
   • In your Company Chargeable Items, create a new charge type called “Opening Balances” Set the Debit and Credit account fields to your Accounts Receivable account #.
   • In Edit Owner Ledger, find your Unit, and click on New Transaction>New Charge and select the new “Opening Balance” charge type you just created.
     • Enter in the outstanding amounts and be cognisant of how old the charge should be. You should notice that your Credit and Debit accounts are already set to your Accounts Receivable
   • This will cancel each other out and continue to reflect your true A/R amount.
   • If an owner has a credit, enter a New Payment, and select the Credit radio button.  Set the debit account to your Accounts Relievable account and enter the amount of the credit as a positive number.

If during the transition, it has been identified that there are Outstanding cheques, all you need to do is add a journal entry for each cheque separately, set the particulars/memo of the journal entry to describe what the journal entry is.

For example:  “Cheque #144 – Bell Canada”.
This is for when reconciliation comes, you’ll be able to identify the line items in the reconciliation screen.

“Credit” the Bank and “Debit” the Bank