Opening balances

If you are moving to Kontala from other software - or from a shoebox - your business did not start from nothing on your Kontala start date. It had a bank balance, customers who owed it money, suppliers waiting to be paid, maybe a loan and some equipment.

Opening balances are how you record that position.

Go to Settings, then Opening Balances.

The date

Opening balances are always struck at your Kontala start date, set under Settings, then Accounting Dates. You do not pick a date here, and there is no per-line date - that column is the day Kontala starts counting.

If you later change your Kontala start date, the opening balances move with it.

The grid

Every account you can hold an opening balance on is listed, starting at zero. Enter a figure against the ones that apply and leave the rest alone.

Because the grid is built from your chart of accounts, an account added later appears here automatically.

What is shown but not editable here

Some opening positions are recorded on their own screens and appear read-only in the grid:

• Bank balances - set on the bank account itself. See Add a bank account.
• Stock - the opening quantity you entered when creating a tracked item. See Tracked inventory.
• Capital assets - see below.

Assets you already owned

Equipment bought before you started using Kontala has no purchase document here, so it would never reach your asset register and would never depreciate.

Use Record an asset you already owned to add one. Enter its original cost and the depreciation accumulated so far, not just its current book value.

That matters: recording only the net book value would restart a half-worn asset at full value and over-depreciate it for the rest of its life. With both figures, depreciation carries on from where it left off and a later disposal finds the balances it expects.

Still to allocate

The figure at the foot is the part of your opening position nobody has recorded yet.

It sits in an unallocated equity account, so an unfinished opening position reads as exactly that. It is deliberately not put into Suspense, where it would appear on your Balance Sheet as a real asset or a real creditor.

Bring it to zero. Until you do, approving a year end and closing a tax year are both blocked, because the figures being signed off rest on it.

Related

• Moving to Kontala
• Journal entries
• Accounting dates and settings