Opening Balances Form

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I'm planning on developing a special form for entering opening balances. I think an easy way of entering opening balances is crucial to have an existing business migrate to ADempiere without too much hassle.

This link below, is a good description of how complicated it is at the moment:

http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/Establish_Opening_Balances

I'm not saying that it's hard for me, but it's a very non-standard way of setting things up if you are an accountant with experience in other accounting systems.

At a quick glance, ADempiere gives the impression that it has no functionality to establish opening balances, which is an odd thing for an accounting system to miss.

The difference with opening balances and other balance accounts is that the opening balance can change. It changes because the opening balance is normally not fully known when the accounting period (which the opening balance applies to) starts.

If you are migrating from another accounting system into ADempiere, the scenario is very possible this:

You start using ADempiere at the beginning of a new period. Let's say 2009-10-01. All accounting that belongs to the periods before 2009-10-01 is bookkeeped in the old system, let's call it Legacy. All accounting that belongs to the new period, is bookkeeped in ADempiere.

If you're switching systems, you'd most probably want to be really sure that all numbers are correct and you'll make some kind of closure in the Legacy system. Since you can't pause the business, the closure will be done over time, in parallel with creating new invoices, making payments etc in the new system ADempiere.

When the closure is complete, you'll enter the opening balances into ADempiere, where accounting has already taken place.

Suggestions for implementation

• Add a new GL Category Type (Opening Balance) of Category Type = D (since there should be no restriction on what accounts that can have an opening balance)
• Change MSetup (Rows 575 and ahead) to create this new type when the client is created.
• Rule: It can only exist one opening balance journal batch per client.
• Make the opening balance only adjustable from a special form for opening balances. Screenshot will come.

Maintainer

Maintainer of this page: Daniel Tamm