Opening Balances – Purchase Ledger

Purpose: After creating the individual supplier details this process enters the amounts due to or from each supplier.

Preparation: Firstly, decide the period from which you wish to start your new transactions from – should be the same as the sales ledger and nominal ledger

Secondly, decide which scenario best suits your needs –
1.Enter one opening balance for each supplier, having checked that the balance is correct. – Outstanding Balances.
2.Enter all outstanding transactions, including unmatched cash, for each supplier. – Outstanding Transactions.
3. Enter all transactions for each supplier from a predetermined date – History.

For your accounting period and cut-off date in your business year, obtain a detailed Purchase Ledger Account Balance listing from your current accounting system in sufficient detail to input the historical transactions or opening balances analysis that you require. In Prelude ensure the Nominal ledger Control accounts are set up – See Control Accounts. (opens in a new tab)”>Nominal Ledger >Control AccountsControl Accounts. (opens in a new tab)”>.

It would be ideal if this were obtained in a spreadsheet format. Also ensure you have a control total.

Scenario 1 – Outstanding Balances

This procedure inputs a summary of your opening balances without any details of the historical transactions that make up each balance.
This may be sufficient for your purposes, especially if you can keep a copy of your current system to review historical transactions when necessary.
1.Set the accounting period to the current – the same as the listing or the period before you intend to start posting from.
2. Click Menus > Ledgers > Nominal > Journals > Standard to open the Nominal Ledger Journal Entry Form. See also Make Nominal Ledger Adjustments for an introduction to journal entries.
3.Input Purchase Ledger balances as follows – Credit Purchase Ledger Accounts, Debit Nominal Suspense Account. Use ‘Opening Balance’ as the narrative.
4.Click OK to post the journal – this will create credit entries in the Purchase Ledger Control Account on the balance sheet.
5.Check the Suspense account total and the Purchase Ledger Control total – they should both agree to the listing control total – if not print an Aged Creditor Listing and find and correct any differences by creating further journals.
6. Print a final aged Creditors Listing and retain. 7. Run Period end on the purchase ledger see Purchase Ledger Period-End for an explanation of how to do this.
8. You should check the “Clear YTD Turnover and Analysis” box in the Purchase Ledger End of Period Form.

Scenario 2 – Outstanding Transactions.

If the Purchase Ledger Account listing can be converted to a spreadsheet format, then you may import the individual purchase ledger account entries using the CSV Import option in Daybooks > Purchase >CSV Import. As above, set the accounting period to the current – the same as the listing or the period before you intend to start posting from.

If you do not have it in spreadsheet format, you could create the spreadsheet and verify the totals then import as above or post individual amounts to the ledger. The easiest way to do this is to use Daybooks > Purchase > Batch Posting and devise a control process – e.g. post one supplier at a time and agree the balance before making the posting. Complete the exercise as in 6 to 8 above.

Scenario 3 – History

As in scenario 2 above you can import the historical transactions – invoices and credit notes, but not the payments. Enter payments as a separate spreadsheet as credit notes but with a cash reference. You will then need to allocate all the payments before completing 6 to 8 above.
Any journals can be made as normal. This matching is important whichever method of VAT accounting you have adopted.

If you can’t import the transactions – still create two batches of postings – invoices and credits and cash payments and process these through Batch Postings as in Scenario 2 above and match the payments. Any journals can be made as normal.

In this scenario postings will be made to various expense accounts and the VAT control Account – and not the Suspense Account. As you have posted nothing else yet ( except sales accounts which you have cleared) you can run a Trial Balance and create a journal to bring the expense and VAT accounts to Nil and post the resultant debit to the suspense account – should be the same as the Purchase Ledger Control Account. As above do 6 to 8. Alternatively you could make all postings to suspense account then clear when posting the Trial Balance.

When you come to close the Nominal Ledger print the necessary VAT input/output analyses and clear the VAT file before running month end.

If you follow this procedure, your new product will produce trading and V.A.T. reports only for new transactions entered in your new system.

Now go to Opening Balances: Nominal Ledger.