I tried the report when I put the date from 01/01/2018 to 30/09/2018. the opening balances is not appearing the report. 2017 closing balances must be appear as opening balances in 2018.
please do correct me if I didn’t get right
Correct you should have opening balance. But you’ll see the line only if it’s different from zero.
I have balance sheet balances but nothing there in the report
it don’t know if the starting balances linked to the report or not if not the it should
I posted this picture as a suggestion for the report. Red entries are credit, so liabilities and revenue accounts have red fonts balances.
I was doing the same for Summary general ledger. It isn’t listed their
It’s not acceptable under a legal point of view (at least in Italy and so in EU). I don’t see the problem to have three columns. My suggestion is only to have a first temporary and quick solution without radically change the report.
1st thanks lubos , but we still need please
1-closing balance
2- be able to choose specifc account (as ozca request )
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For those who are asking for Opening balance on income/expense accounts, why is it a thing?
Technically speaking, income/expense accounts are temporary accounts, they don’t really hold balances. This is why Profit & Loss Statement is for the period. Not as at specific date.
For General Ledger Transactions report to show opening balances for income/expense accounts, I’d need to ask for the third date - starting date of accounting period or something in that regard.
Closing balances can be put into report easily without affecting totals at the bottom of the report. Ability to select specific account can be also added.
@lubos From an accounting perspective, income and expense accounts DO hold balances for the duration of the financial year, however those balances do not carry forward from year to year because they “close off” to the retained earnings account in the Balance Sheet. Therefore, all income and expense accounts start each financial year with a zero balance. A General Ledger Report for an income or expense account must always have a closing balance that equals the sum of all of the transactions in that account from the start of the financial year until the specified “to date” of that report. Logically, it therefore follows that if opening balances were NOT included in a General Ledger Report (for income or expense accounts), the report would only be valid if it were run with a “from date” which was equal to the first day of the financial year … any other date would result in an imbalance UNLESS the opening balance was included. Therefore, the methodology for producing a General Ledger Report (for income and expense accounts) would be to specify a “from date” and a “to date”; the system would then calculate that account’s opening balance by “accumulating” all of the transactions for that account from the start of the financial year until a date which is one day before the “from date”. The only exception to this “rule” would be where the “from date” is equal to the start of the financial year; in that case, the opening balance would be zero.
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I suggest ozcapa reply !
And for my part I demand this feature so we can print any expense or revenue of any given period for any of the years or specific period ( let say from 01/01/2014 till 31/12/2014 ) in one click , and this reports needs for analysis and budgeting and for auditing requests .
@ozcpa, you seem to be overlooking the fact that Manager is a perpetual accounting system. Therefore, income and expense accounts are not closed at the end of a financial period. Nor do they begin the next with zero balances. They begin with all previous transactions posted to them. And, in fact, no running balance is maintained. Instead, balances are calculated on the fly according to the context. Setting the reporting period causes the program to report only those transactions (and the resulting net balance) during the defined interval. This is true for all different situations in Manager, including reports.
If you want a report that includes transactions from before the From date, you should change the date.
Look at the title of the report you want changes to. It is named General Ledger Transactions, not Summary, not Balances. There are other reports that furnish such information. Many of the comments in this thread seem to be from the perspective of non-perpetual accounting systems. In such cases, they could make sense. But they don’t for a perpetual system. It is the perpetual nature of the system that makes transition from accounting period to the next so easy in Manager.
@abedsabd, you can already do that by defining a report for whatever period you want. It is not a one-click process. Nor would it be in any accounting system, because you would always have to enter dates.
@Tut With due respect, from an accounting perspective, income and expense accounts MUST close-off to zero at the start of each accounting year; with the balance of all income and expense accounts “netted off” to a Retained Earnings account in the Balance Sheet. What you state may be correct from a “system’s perspective” (viz. that Manager may never actually delete the transactions or the balances), however, from an accounting perspective, the concept of closing G/L income and expense accounts to zero at the start of each financial year is inherent in the accounting process. A computerised system may “mask” this requirement, but for anyone interested in the correct ACCOUNTING treatment, they should refer to the concept of “T-Accounts” (which indicates how General Ledger accounts are established and maintained). Therefore, I strongly believe that the methodology that I outlined previously in this post is the correct one. Furthermore, EVERY other computerised system that I have ever used (and there have been dozens) formulate their “General Ledger Reports” in this manner.
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I think that we can altogether work to collect examples of general ledger reports from other softwares, particularly from the perpetual ones in order to find out a proposal for @lubos.
However @ozcpa, I don’t think you should fossilize to T-account but to the minimum informations required by your local laws and your local authorities. When I started using Manager, it was not in line with the italian laws but I made some suggestions and after a couple of years of addings and adjustments now it is.
Keep in mind, in the end, that thanks to custom reports and hopefully to the new plugins system we will get a lot of specific (horizontally and vertically) improvements.
@Davide I am not advocating a return to the “dinosaur days” of T-Accounts. 
My comment was only intended to convey the fact that, regardless of how an accounting system is maintained, the fundamental principles of accounting must still be maintained. And, those fundamental principles require what I have mentioned in my posts: including the fact that income and expense accounts must start each financial year with a zero balance
@ozcpa, I completely understand what you are saying. I started with hand-written journals and account ledgers myself in the far distant past. But you should admit that things were done that way because the ability to instantly sum huge volumes of transactions on the fly did not exist. They had to be done that way. Now, we have alternatives that are much simpler. And the question of closing out or maintaining perpetual accounts really has nothing to do with T-accounts. Those concepts remain useful.
I suppose that users will use whatever is most meaningful to them. And, they won’t miss what they never had. However, to me, as a Consultant CPA, a General Ledger Report needs to have an Opening Balance; Transactions; and a Closing Balance. I realise that all of this information can be obtained by the user from somewhere in the Manager system and then “manipulated” to suit their purpose, but my experience with dozens of systems including Attache, Sage, Handisoft, MYOB, Quick Books, SAP etc has been that their General Ledger Reports have ALL the required information in a single report. Also, for audit purposes, most auditors will use a printed copy of the G/L to sample from, but the first check would be to reconcile the closing G/L balances back to a “lead schedule” for the financial statements. That said, as most of Manager’s users are NOT accountants, my “ramblings” in relation to this issue probably won’t make any difference to them (or anyone else)
I haven’t thought this through, but I think the income and expenses accounts will always never have opening balances regardless of the period the general ledger report is produced.
This is because, balance sheet accounts show carrying values or values as at a specific date from their beginning. Income and expenses accounts do not keep accounts of their opening balances because they show profit or loss made for a specific date. So if the GL report is only for the month of May, it will show incomes and expenses of the month of May, and there will be no such thing as opening balances. The balance of the Retain earnings account in the balance sheet holds the history of Income and expenses accounts.
There is no need for opening balances for Income and Expenses account. No need at all.
We just have opening balances for BS accounts in the GL, we only need closing balances in the GL now.
Wow, never done that before, started practicing in 2015.
@ozcpa mind is fixed on the accounting year. But as @Tut explained above, Manager is a perpetual system. If you set it to show you a report for only three months, it assumes the three month is a full financial reporting period. The history of the income and expenses accounts would be in the retained earnings in the balance sheet