Hi, If I were you, I would ask your accountant to give you the balance sheet as of 28/2/2022, or better still the detailed trial balance (called Account Summary in GnuCash reports).
Those closing balances would then become the opening balances as of 1/3/2022. You will need those numbers if are to do the job properly. Why re-invent what your accountant should already have done? The net asset (including cash) will equal the initial equity you put into the business plus the accumulated profit/ losses you made since then , plus any borrowings. You can journal those opening entries in. Sure, you can have a sub account under equity where you would record assets so that you have a debit and credit, and it would balance, but I am afraid it would not be correct. Regards David Apologies if this is too much an accounting question, but I'm stuck, and am trying to work out how GnuCash will handle this. I'm trying to enter into GnuCash my company accounts for this financial year only - I'm not going to bother trying to enter every transaction since the company started. So the opening balances should reflect the company's financial position on 28/2/2022, and transactions from 1/3/22 being recorded. I have the account Assets:Fixed Assets All that contains is test equipment and computer equipment, all of which will be depreciated - there's no land, or other things that don't depreciate. I initially set Assets:Fixed Assets to have an opening balance of ?x, as that's what my accountant told me the total of all thef fixed assets was worth. I see that is reflected in the account Equity:Opening Balances However, after I asked him, my accountant gave me a breakdown of the net value of the individual fixed assets, which have obviously depreciated over time. I thought it would be useful to have their individual net values on 28/2/2022 recorded in GnuCash, so when I depreciate them next year, I can keep a track of the depreciation. (I also thought of depreciating them monthly, which I could probably do with the scheduled transactions, as my accountant is using linear depreciation). That brings me to the problem that my initial entry for the opening balance of these fixed assets would be wrong, and should possibly set to zero. Can I set that balance to zero, then delete the appropriate Equity:Opening Balances entry? Would it be sensible to have a sub-account under Equity:Fixed Assets, or is that just not sensible? Obviously by the very nature of a double-entry system, in order to debit the Fixed Assets, I need to credit somewhere else. On Mon, 16 Jan 2023, 12:31 , <gnucash-user-requ...@gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user-requ...@gnucash.org> > wrote: Send gnucash-user mailing list submissions to gnucash-user@gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user@gnucash.org> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to gnucash-user-requ...@gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user-requ...@gnucash.org> You can reach the person managing the list at gnucash-user-ow...@gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user-ow...@gnucash.org> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of gnucash-user digest..." *************************** _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.