Hi, I’m new to accounting having been a spreadsheet P&L person. At the start of my new FY I moved to Quickfile. I have been recording bills and costs on Quickfile but didn’t set up any opening balances for either clients, suppliers or the bank. I need to understand what opening balances are and how do this. I have some understanding from reading other posts but I’m still unsure how to bring it all together.
Suppliers/Clients - I think I need opening balances so that money coming in/out after the start of my financial year has something to be allocated against. To create these, I have total figures for each client/supplier and I can create an invoice/bill dated before the start of my year.
Bank opening balance - I think this is a balance from my bank statement as of a specific date. Is this date the point at which I started using Quickfile so, for me, 1 May? However I read that someone else trying to do this couldn’t put in the actual balance as it appears on their statement because of the opening balance supplier/bills used to create opening balances.
My question is how to do this in the most sensible way and with noddy instructions/language.
Ok in that case check out the quickfile knowledge base on how to enter opening balances. But essentially the opening balance journal will mainly consist of data from your last year end balance sheet.
Thanks Paul, but I need something to help with opening balances not created at the time of starting to use Quickfile - the knowledge section only covers supplier opening balances if opened when creating the supplier. My problem is creating opening balances afterwards.
No, in my last financial year, Supplier X had outstanding bills of £100. These will get paid by the current year bank. I need to create Supplier X’s opening balance so that I can tag these when the bank statement is uploaded. Or if there is a way to write a journal to ignore it all … but I don’t know how to do that either.
In this case, you would create a purchase invoice for the balance (in this case, £100) and note what nominal ledgers it affects. This should be dated before the date you started using QuickFile.
You would then adjust your opening balance journal to account for this invoice, otherwise the amount gets counted twice.
Then, when the supplier pays, you can tag it to the outstanding invoice.
Thanks that does help. So my Bank opening balance is £100, less suppliers total opening balance of £10 and Customer opening balance of £20 = Bank opening balance £110?
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