Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique.
If your business used a previous accounting system before FR Books, you will need to enter Opening Balances.
On the date of transfer to FR Books, your old system will have closing balances, usually in the form of a Trial Balance report. These balances will be for items such as the value of assets, bank balances, loan balances, etc.
The closing balances would be used as the Opening Balances in FR Books, so it's important to ensure that the bookkeeping completed on your previous system was correct and complete up to that date.
The Opening Balances Wizard guides you through the process of entering Opening Balances, as seen below.
While it is possible to begin using FR Books at any point, there are certain dates that work better depending on how your business trades.
Starting from a new financial year (usually 6th April for sole traders, or the day after your year-end on Companies House if you have limited company) is usually the best option, as it means your bookkeeping records are not spread across two systems when preparing the accounts/tax return.
However, if your business is VAT registered, we strongly advise that you start from the beginning of a new VAT quarter to ensure VAT calculations are correct in FR Books.
If you transfer partway through a VAT quarter, then you may require additional support to ensure the first VAT return in FR Books is submitted correctly.
To enter Opening Balances in FR Books, go to Tools > Opening Balance Wizard. You will then be presented with the Opening Balance Wizard, pictured below.
The first two steps instruct on adding customers and suppliers to FR Books (if you haven't done so already).
You only need to add the customers and suppliers who you owe money to ('creditors') and who owe money to you ('debtors') at the date of transfer to FR Books.
If you have an extensive list of customers/suppliers to add, they can also be imported.
If your business is VAT-registered, you will need to supply your VAT details.
You may have already entered this information when originally setting up FR Books, but if not, you will need to enter it now.
It is important to get the VAT settings right at this stage so that FR Books is able to calculate the VAT correctly on the Opening Balance transactions, such as in the amounts owed from your customers.
You will then need to change the date of the outstanding amounts to be the same as the date that you began to use FR Books.
If you were neither owed money from debtors nor owed money to creditors, you can skip this stage.
If money was owed, then all invoices which make up the amounts owed will need to be entered here. You can enter customer and supplier invoices here by changing the 'Type' of transaction on each row.
The final step asks for the remainder of your Opening Balances, which you can take from the Trial Balance of your previous system.
Note that the amount owed from customers and amount owed to suppliers have been populated for you.
These amounts should match those on the closing trial balance of the previous system; if they do not, return to the previous step and correct the invoicing entries.
Ensure that the date entered (highlighted above) is the start date transactions that are being entered from; this should be the day after the closing trial balance date.
