The guided way to bring the balances from your old books into MISAC. You give it a trial balance for one fiscal year, it shows you what will be booked, and it posts the whole thing as one balanced Opening Balance voucher.
When to use it
When you are going live and have to load last year's closing balances as this year's opening figures. You also use it when a first attempt was loaded wrongly and you need to take it out and do it again.
Before you start
- The fiscal year you are loading into must already be set up, with the right start date. The voucher is dated the first day of that year.
- Every account named in your file must already exist in the chart of accounts. One account it cannot find stops the whole load.
- You need view rights to preview, create rights to post, and delete rights to reverse.
- Have an equity account ready to absorb any difference between the two sides.
Where to find it
Setup > Opening Balances.
The fields on this screen
How it works
- Pick the fiscal year. The screen tells you straight away whether an opening balance is already posted for it. Only one can be posted per year.
- Upload your file. It reads a spreadsheet whose first row is a header naming the three columns the screen shows beside the Upload button. Rows are checked as they are read, and any row it cannot use is listed before you go further.
- Preview. Nothing is written yet. You see every line with its debit and credit, and the two totals. Several rows for the same account are added together into one line, and a line that nets to nothing drops out. If the two sides differ, the difference is shown as an extra equity line, highlighted, so you see the imbalance instead of having it quietly absorbed. If no equity account is available to take it, the screen refuses to go on, so a book that does not balance is never posted.
- Post. This writes one balanced Opening Balance voucher, dated the first day of the chosen fiscal year. From then on the amounts are ordinary ledger entries. The Trial Balance, Ledger and financial statements count them from that date forward, exactly as they count any other posted voucher. Nothing later treats them as special.
- Reverse removes that voucher and its lines and frees the year, so you can correct the file and post again. It is the only way to redo a year.
Negative amounts are refused. Put a credit figure in the credit column instead of a minus in the debit column.
Tips and common mistakes
- Check the fiscal year's start date before you post. The voucher takes that date, and moving the date afterwards does not move the entries already posted.
- Reverse, do not patch. If the load was wrong, reverse it and post the corrected file. Piecemeal corrections leave you without a clean opening position.
- The difference line is a warning sign, not a fix. A large one usually means a missing account or a figure in the wrong column, not a real equity balance.
Related guides
Fiscal Year holds the year and its start date. See also Ledger, Trial Balance and Journal Voucher.