Opening Balances – Sales Ledger

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

Preparation: Firstly, decide the period from which you wish to start your new transactions from.

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

For your accounting period and cut-off date in your business year, obtain a detailed Sales Ledger Account Balance listing from your current accounting system in sufficient detail to input the historical transactions or opening balances analysis that you require.

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.
Set the accounting period to the current – the same as the listing – the period before the one you intend to start posting from.
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.
Input Sales Ledger balances as follows – Debit Sales Ledger Accounts, Credit Nominal Suspense Account.
OK to post the journal – this will create Debit entries in the Sales Ledger Control Account on the Balance Sheet.
Check the suspense account total and the Sales Ledger Control total – they should both agree to the listing control total – if not print an Aged Debtor Listing and find and correct any differences by creating further journals.
Print a final aged Debtors Listing and retain.
Run Period end on the Sales Ledger – See Sales Ledger Period-End for an explanation of how to do this.

You should check the “Clear YTD Turnover and Analysis” box in the Sales Ledger End of Period form.

Scenario 2 – Outstanding Transactions.

If the Sales Ledger Account listing can be converted to a spreadsheet format, then you may import the individual Sales Ledger Account entries using the CSV Import option in Daybooks > Sales >CSV Import. As above,set the accounting period to the current – the same as the listing – the one before the period 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 > Sales > Batch Posting and devise a control process – e.g. post one customer at a time and agree the balance before making the posting. Complete the exercise as above.

Scenario 3 – History

As in 2 above you can import the historical transactions –invoices and credit notes, but not the receipts. Enter receipts as a separate spreadsheet as credit notes but with a cash reference. You will then need to allocate all the cash receipts before closing the period – see 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 Receipts and process these through Batch Postings as in Scenario 2 as above and match the payments. Any journals can be made as normal.

In this scenario Postings will be made to Sales accounts and the VAT control Account – and not the Suspense Account. As you have posted nothing else yet you can run a Trial Balance and create a journal to bring the Sales and VAT accounts to Nil and post the resultant credit to the suspense account – should be the same as the Sales Ledger Control Account. As above but In this case check both analysis boxes in the Sales Ledger end of Period form. Alternatively you may be able to post all entries to the suspense account unless there is a good reason to post entries to sales and VAT.

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.