Hello, I’m currently in the process of registering new inventory items along with their opening balances. In the past, I recall there being a section for entering the starting balance quantity along with its average cost to record these opening balances. However, I can’t seem to find it now. Could someone please assist me with this matter? Thank you.
You are correct. The absence of these fields is a recent development. I am placing this into bugs. If @lubos moved starting balances elsewhere, it was not announced. And I cannot find the feature anywhere.
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Not a bug.
It’s true that the latest version has removed the concept of starting balances from the program. New approach is to simply create transactions to establish these balances which many businesses had to do anyway because starting balances could not capture everything required.
For example, even single inventory item could have number of starting balances. Qty on hand, qty to receive, qty owned, qty to deliver etc. To establish quantity to receive or quantity to deliver, you’d need to enter individual sales and purchase orders.
If you need to set up Qty Owned starting balance, you have number of options but the most straightforward one would be to record a journal entry where you select account Inventory On Hand, then inventotory item, enter quantity and total cost.
Balance can be posted to Retained Earnings account.
Typically this journal entry would contain starting balances for all your accounts, not just inventory items.
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With this new approach, will it be possible to import balances ( batch create) ?
Yes. Batch create works across all transactional tabs.
What about Capital accounts starting balances? There is no sub-account selected for Capital accounts in the newly created Journal Entry for Starting Balances. Its not going into suspense but on Capital Account Summary its showing that entry on suspense column. Is it going to make any issue in the future?
It’s only presentation issue on that particular report. Maybe I shouldn’t name the column Suspense but something else to look less serious.
And if you make sure your starting balance journal entry is dated before the date range of the report, then the amount will show as starting balance.
This new approach to Starting Balances has opened Journal Entries to all GL accounts including Bank & Cash Accounts and Accumulated Depreciation accounts.
There will be some users that begin to use journals for Bank & Cash account transactions and for Depreciation Entries (Other than for Starting Balances).
I probably won’t use journals for Bank & Cash Accounts, but most likely I will use Journals for depreciation entries.
My fear is that if I start doing this, that the new found functionality will be taken away again. I think that we need some insight into how some of the new developments are going to unfold so that we can use the program with more certainty.
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When update are been done automatically like this without the users been informed. It interrupt management and work flow of the company. Please i think the only way to fix this issue is to notify users of new update specifying the update been done and user should update there system them self after well consideration. I can’t leave work in the evening and come back the next day and see the system deferent. Please understand that for any update you do we need to teach our staff about it. it not good and seriously management will start considering other options for accounting software. Please remember before we choose manager, we have gone through the system and see that it fit perfectly with our own policy. the frequent update and changing of things affect our management work flow.
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You maybe right about informing users about the changelog of the updates. But what i dont get is
You enter starting balances only when you are starting you accounting software for the 1st time. All your starting balances are already there just at a different place with a different approach. It didnt affect any of your accounts.All done automatically for all users. It would’ve been an issue if all starting balances were gone without this Journal Entry.
Not sure if you are still exploring manager for potential use or are already a user, but Manager seems to be developed using Agile processes which means continuous development with very frequent feature updates, quick bug-fixes, etc. but without a clearly defined roadmap. All those elements that made Agile application development popular and most used (search Google). Users of such applications benefit from the interactions with the developer via this forum where bugs are posted, ideas shared, etc. that help shape the application to the benefit of the users. Obviously, it is human, and we like anyone else are sometimes very frustrated with the loss of some features without a clear replacement. However, over time it is also clear that eventually these lead to better products. This waiting can be very frustrating and also some directions taken are found to be a dead end and then new ones get implemented leaving users in limbo. But we like it despite these flaws.
If, as you indicate, would like perceived stability, and feel more confident using an application where updates are few and are announced well in advance with only bug-fixes being made until the next version then Manager will not suit you.
I’m not really sure, but this change shouldn’t disrupt our business data.
Only the way to record Opening Balance is different.
In the previous version, when we created an opening balance we also created a transaction, but the transaction was not displayed on the Journal Tabs, we could see it in Summary-Transactions. For the new version we record the opening balance directly via Journal Entries.
And for consistency, I also hope that the Opening Balance for all Accounts including Cash and Bank can be recorded via Journal Entries.
Starting ballance is missing from the form
I also see the Business Logo combined in Business Details.
I disagree. When we started using Manager we were surprised and did not like that we could not use Journal entries for Bank & Cash. However, soon we came to appreciate the underlying philosophy because small youth business that we support via Angel investment struggle with finance and accounting and using tabs to avoid debit and credit mistakes has been hugely beneficial.
We train these small business owners in what matters to them such as easy to understand data entry and ability to generate the essential finance reports. To stay in businesses they must be guided by Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss and Cash Flow and it also helps that the Summary Screen reminds them of it daily.
Limiting direct Journal entries and preventing Bank & Cash makes it easy for these business owners and for us to support them and focus on running their business and generate Net-Profit.
While I have read all the responses to the original post, I must agree that I was set back a few hours when I found the opening balances option missing just three days after I had finished importing 16,000 odd inventory items into the accounting setup for the new financial year (April to March here) after our annual stock-taking.
It was indeed a case of “yesterday it was there, and today it is gone”, prompting me to believe that something was wrong. I was also thrown off because the date in the journal entry was really odd! This prompted me to delete the whole set of journal entries as a precaution, before I investigated further (and restored the deleted entries).
That said, thanks for the explanations, things make sense again.
We have use Manager for 9 years now even though we started with desktop version use by our accountant. but we have been using the cloud version for almost 6 months.
We are company, before any changes is made decisions are made. Many things have gone wrong with our system right now. Now i need to start doing more work to understand the flow then teach my colleagues and workers. All i ask is that the automatic update is not the best. some users might just like the previous way manager was. we operate from different part of the world our accounting system and ways might not be similar. The update you make might not be needed for some users. I join the forum because as a customer i started experiencing changes that we don’t need . I am saying this because i have seen changes not just one
Please let us be able to decide when to update
Thank you
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Same here. As a small business this is a huge problem for us, especially having to explain to our data entry people that the new version now ‘works this way’ and train them accordingly.
This isn’t about the usefulness of the changes, just that we would like control over it, so that we can make the transition with least effort.
@lubos one thing if you can clear for everyone if someone got thousands of customers/inventory items/suppliers, whats gonna happen in that case? A Journal Entry with thosands of lines is going to be too much. Or starting balance will be divided into many journal entries in that case?
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I use the Desktop version and actually waited for many months to update because it looked like changes were going to cost me a lot of time to update (items inside inventory listing as an example). I also find that the guides are not keeping up very well. I KNOW what a pain it is to update manuals. Many software companies include or have available a listing of what was fixed or added in any particular update. Even if it would be too ponderous to list bug fixes, might you consider a listing of changes to workflow to go along with updates? This could at least give us a head’s up on what might need to be done or change. You could also make this available to those using the paid service - maybe the day before the change is actually made? I think that might lessen the onslaught of forum posts when something changes and people think it’s a bug or broken. Just a thought.
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Hello, almost all users are worried and have not liked the change of starting balance of an individual item to move to the Journal entry. Its really causing a lot of problem.
Management/developer is once again requested to revert back to the old system of individual item starting balance, please.
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