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Enter Your Accounts' Opening Balances
Unless you're just starting a new business, most of your accounts probably already have balances -- you've made sales, paid bills, perhaps bought inventory and conducted a variety of other business activities that affect accounts' balances. For example, if you've deposited money in your business's checking account, that account has a balance. In this step, you'll enter those balances.
You're not required to enter account balances before you start using MYOB AccountEdge, but your financial records may not be completely accurate if you don't.
The amounts you enter here should be for the first day of your conversion month (that is, the month you begin using AccountEdge). If the current month is your conversion month and you've made some transactions already this month (sales or purchases, for example), don't include those transactions in your accounts' opening balances. Instead, enter these amounts as transactions, to ensure that you have a complete record of your business activities for the month.
If your conversion month is the first month of your fiscal year, all you need to enter is the balances of your balance sheet accounts (asset, liability and equity accounts). If your conversion month isn't the beginning of your fiscal year, you should enter the balances of all your accounts.
Enter your balances as positive numbers. (Don't, for example, enter asset amounts as positive numbers and liability amounts as negative numbers.) AccountEdge knows whether each account should have a debit or credit balance. Enter a negative amount only if an account has a negative balance.
If you or your accountant has a trial balance report for the month prior to your conversion month, the ending balance for each account for that month will be its opening balance in AccountEdge. If you don't have a trial balance report, you can use the amounts on a current balance sheet for you asset, liability and equity accounts' opening balances; you can use the amounts on a year-to-date profit and loss statement for your income, cost of sales and expense accounts' opening balances.
If your conversion month is the first month of your fiscal year, the opening balance of all your income and expense accounts, as well as your Current-year Earnings account, should be zero. Additionally, the previous year's earnings should already be included in the balance of your Retained Earnings account.
AccountEdge includes an equity account for your current-year earnings. The opening balance for this account is calculated automatically. Although this account doesn't appear in the Account Opening Balances window, don't worry -- it does exist. Since AccountEdge will track these amounts automatically, you don't need to create a current-year earnings account and enter a balance for it.
Accounts Easy Setup Assistant - Enter Your Accounts Opening Balances