With utmost respect to others who may disagree with my position in relation to this matter, I started practicing as a Consultant CPA in 1985 and have acted at the Director level in mid-sized Australian CPA and CA accountancy firms for a large part of that time. I also have an extensive background in IT consulting. I therefore believe that my experience allows me to authoritatively comment on accounting-related matters. I can assure everyone that Opening balances ARE required in G/L Reports. Balance Sheet accounts will ALWAYS have an opening balance and income and expense accounts will also except for the first day of each financial year (where the balance will always be zero).
I have āharped onā about this issue for almost a year and have spent far too much of my time in trying to explain my position to others (mainly, non-Accountants). If others donāt agree, well so be it. If the development of Manager G/L Reports progresses as I (and some others) have suggested, then I would be very pleased, but if it doesnāt, I will work around it.
My point has always been that EVERY OTHER accounting system DOES include Opening balances in their G/L Reports. That decision would not have been made by EVERY other accounting system software supplier on a mere whim ā¦ it was made because that is what is an accounting system ādemandsā due to accounting conventions and auditability.
Sorry but I donāt understand your castled position. @lubos added opening balances a few weeks ago. So we have all informations we need under a legal point of view (at least in Italy). We have even āmoreā than we needā¦ we have opening amounts of the profit and loss accounts.
I understand that it would be better to exclude these amounts from the p&l part of the report to be more āstandardā. But the document is perfectly balanced and easily understandable by every guy on the earth expecially by a long term experienced accountant like you.
As I said, the laws set the minimum amount of informations that a report should have, not the format nor the structure of thinking of the algorithm behind the report and so I can say that Manager is compliant to the European laws (I have my balances periodically checked by chartered auditors, chartered accountants and depositary banks since I work with investment funds).
Let say your financial accounting year is 01/01/20x1 to 31/12/20x1
You only need your date range to start from 01/01/20x1 to where ever you want e.g 30/06/20x1. That way, Balance sheet items will show their opening balances from 31/12/20x0 and the income statement account will show transactions ranging from the beginning of the year to that date. If you care so much about the opening balances of income and expenditure account in GL transactions report, why donāt you make your date range from the beginning of the financial year to that date so that you so that you donāt worry about not seeing opening balances? Because everything will be there.
If you say opening balance of I&E account what do you mean? opening balances from the beginning of the financial year or carrying balance of that account (like a balance sheet account)? It will be totally a waste of time for @lubos to spend even a second trying to implement this (Opening balance for I&E accounts because Manager already takes care of this by allowing the user to change the start date of the report to where ever they desire). If you want it to show opening balances based on the history from the beginning of the financial year, just make your date range start from the financial year.
Purpose of income statement account is to measure profit for a specific period by matching revenue of the specified period against expenses of the specified period. Bringing in opening balances for the I&E accounts will mean the Income statement is no longer measuring profit for a specified period of the report but rather something else. Balance sheet accounts are meant to show the asset and liabilities of the organisation as at a date and must contain opening balances of all the account listed on it.
Regardless of the starting date selected, if the period end date stays the same, balance sheet balances as at the end date stays the same. I&E accounts will however change based on the fact that it must show only income and expenses for that specified time (transactions between the period start date and period end date). The history of transactions before the report start time would be in the balance sheet in retained earnings.
I canāt reproduce the example in the guide for āgenerating a custom report showing your general ledger transactions grouped by account for a specific periodā. I cannot find some of the accounts to refer to as shown in the picture below, I have the latest version 18.11.1 running on windows 8.1
The custom reports feature is still in development and changes fairly rapidly. Some of the terminology has been modified. The Guide has been updated with current terms, but wonāt appear on the web site for up to 24 hours. Meanwhile, in place of GeneralLedgerAccount.Name, look for Account | Name. Itās the same variable.
Great. Now it looks like a standard mainstream report! If @lubos can give us the possibility to filter/extract only a single account it would be perfect.
the start date of the business was 01/01/2018. in the GL summary report I put from 02/01/2018 to 31/10/2018. I have the result without Opening balances. can you please advise If I miss something.
please make another subject if required so others will not get loss
for more information please find the below
First of all you are talking about a different report so you are, somehow offtopic. Secondly the first question which come to my mind isā¦ did you have any movements in 1/1/2018?
Since the closing balance is correct and everything is balanced the report is consistent.
