Entering beginning balances

DanaD · Post by **DanaD** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:28 pm

We just got Power church after using a glorified checkbook program before. When I began using power church on 1/1/06 I didn't know any of the asset or liab. balances since the old bookkeeper never kept track of anything like that except the cash accounts and income and expenses. Now that I know at least the cash accounts and the mortgage amount I am not finding where I can now enter them since I have already set up the chart of accounts. Do I now have to do a general ledger entry now to enter the balances?

Matt · Post by **Matt** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 11:34 pm

Yes, you will need to do a general ledger entry in Fund Accounting to establish these beginning balances. Hopefully when you did your accounting setup you used December 2005 as the first month to post transactions. If so, and if December is still open, post the entries in December. That way they will show up as beginning balances for January 2006.

Eden Whitehead · Post by **Eden Whitehead** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 10:27 pm

matt wrote:Yes, you will need to do a general ledger entry in Fund Accounting to establish these beginning balances. Hopefully when you did your accounting setup you used December 2005 as the first month to post transactions. If so, and if December is still open, post the entries in December. That way they will show up as beginning balances for January 2006.

Matt,
I'm a newbie and just gearing up to input accounting data for 2006 (to build history as well as to get my feet wet in PC+10). (I'm also among the ranks of those with no accounting background

, just 2 years of OJT and good instruction from this forum.) Can you please explain in a little more detail WHY I would want to start with Dec. 2005 rather than Jan. 2006? Thanks in advance for your help.

Matt · Post by **Matt** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:28 pm

If you use the Accounting Setup Assistant and enter all of your beginning balances using the Assistant you can set your start month as January 2006. Once you finish the Assistant the system will post all of your beginning balances to December 2005 so they show up as beginning balances when you run the reports for January. However, in DanaD's situation below he/she wanted to go back and make adjustments to the beginning balances after finishing the setup. In order to do this you would need to set your start month 1 month earlier so that you could post the changes to that month. I have found in helping churches set up their Fund Accounting that often we need to make changes to the beginning balances after we have done the initial accounting set up using the Accounting Setup Assistant. For this reason I recommend that you use December 2005 as your start month when doing the initial setup. This will give you the flexibility to enter adjustments to change your 1/1/06 beginning balances if you need to.