Opening balances | Double-entry accounting

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Avoid mistakes with Banana Accounting Plus

In order to facilitate checking your accounting work and to immediately find differences, in Banana Accounting Plus, our new version, we added the Balance column in the Transaction table. You can now see potential differences on each row and you can correct them right away. It is a very useful feature when closing the accounting period.
Many of our clients have already tried it and are enthusiastic about it. We advise you to switch now to Banana Accounting Plus and take advantage of the many new features.

When using Banana Accounting for the first time, the opening balances need to be inserted manually in order to create the opening balance sheet.

After having set up the Chart of Accounts, proceed as follows:

  1. Place yourself in the Accounts table, Base view, Opening column.
  2. Manually enter the opening balances of the Assets and Liabilities accounts. The Liabilities are entered preceded by the minus (-) sign.
  3. Check if the total Assets equals the total Liabilities so that your accounting balances. If there are differences in the opening balances you need to check and correct them.

Differences in the opening balances

At the opening of the Accounting year, in the Opening columns the amounts of the Total Assets (positive) should correspond to the Total Liabilities (negative) should arrive at zero.
If the Debit and Credit values do not result in zero, the accounting will not be correct and the program will report an error in the Info window.
Recheck and correct the amounts until the value is zero.

If you have entered and deleted accounts, changed groups or anything else, it is useful to use the Check accounting command. (Account1 menu). This recalculates all the values and lets you know if there are any errors.

In the following example the program shows an error message reporting a difference of 150.- CHF.

It is possible to check the balancing in the Totals Table.

Starting the accounting during the year

If you start a new accounting, you have two options if you resume the work already done:

  • Start the accounting from the beginning of the year by entering the opening balances at the beginning of the year and the transactions that have already been recorded previously in other programs (see also Transferring data from other software).
    This way you have all the accounting details in one file.
  • Start from when you resume the accounting.
    • Enter the opening balances in the Opening column, taking the values of the other accounting.
      You have to enter the opening balances not only of the Assets and the Liabilities, but also of the Expenses (Debit, amounts in positive) and Revenues (Credit, amounts in negative).
    • The result for the year to date must be entered in the account Profit/Loss carried forward.
      If it is a profit, the opening balance is to be entered in the negative, if it is a loss in the positive.
    • You must verify that the balance of the opening balances results in zero, so that the program does not indicate any differences.
    • You can start entering new transactions in the Transactions table.

Balances of the previous year

If you start a new accounting by taking over an existing accounting and you want the previous year's values to appear on the printouts, it is necessary to enter the previous year's balances in the Previous view, Previous Year column. For the previous year, Balance sheet and Profit/Loss statement balances are usually entered.
The previous amounts are displayed in the printouts of the Enhanced balance sheet in the Previous Year column.

Create new year

When you start the new year, the program automatically carries over the opening balances for the following year.
Consult the lesson Create New Year.
 

This documentation is outdated

The most complete and up-to-date documentation is the one of Banana Accounting Plus: Try it now

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