Opening Balances
Enter your account balances as at the day you start using Anchor, so reports begin from the right figures.
When you move to Anchor from another system or from spreadsheets, enter the balances you carried over. Use the trial balance from your previous system (or your accountant's year-end figures) as at the day before your first transaction in Anchor.
Set opening balances
- Open Accounting → Opening Balances and click Set opening balances.
- Choose the As of date.
- Under Account balances, add a line per account with its Debit or Credit balance.
- Save. The debits and credits must be equal.
Anchor posts one journal entry for all the lines. The page then lists each account with Money in (debit) and Money owed (credit) and the total.
Change them later
Click Set opening balances again and enter the full, corrected set. Anchor cancels the previous opening balance entry and posts the new one, so you never end up with two.
Customer and supplier balances need the invoices and bills behind them so statements and aged reports work. Import outstanding invoices and bills (see Import & export) rather than putting the whole debtors or creditors balance on one line. An opening balance on a bank's ledger account does not change the balance shown on Accounting → Banking; set that on the bank account itself (see Statement balance).
MCP tools
get_opening_balances, set_opening_balances.