Summary
In this article, we will discuss the definition of a flip account, problems that occur, and a workaround to import your data if your ledger contains flip accounts.
What is a flip account?
A flip account is an account that can take different positions in the ledger depending on whether an entry takes the balance into a negative or a positive. An example might be a bank account with an overdraft, which depending on the balance, could either show as an asset or a liability. These can result in duplicate entries within the trial balance because the same account occupies multiple positions.
Unfortunately, MindBridge isn't currently able to support flip accounts, and as a result the duplicate entries in the trial balance will cause problems when trying to import the opening and closing balances to the Data Page. As a workaround, you will need to remove any duplicate accounts within the trial balance and consolidate any amounts into one row.
Identifying and removing flip accounts in your trial balance
To check if there are any duplicate rows for the accounts on the TB, one option would be to use the Excel COUNTIF formula. The syntax would be assuming the account column is column E and the first data point is in the second row: =COUNTIF(E:E,E2). This formula once filled down will count each cell in column E for the number of occurrences inside column E.
We now want to filter the result of that formula to anything that doesn't equal 1, and sort the account number smallest to largest so that any duplicate values appear next to each other.
The resulting table should look something like this:
Flip accounts typically have the opening and closing balance on multiple rows. We will want to move the balance from the row containing the opening balance to the row containing the closing balance then delete the opening balance row. For example in account 15700 in the screenshot above.
This will need to be repeated for all the accounts containing duplicate entries.
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