Summary
In this article, we will discuss why the opening balance for revenue and expenses account shout be set to zero and how to do so.
Why is this necessary?
Often when exporting a HAÜ file from CaseWare, the opening balance entries for revenue and expenses accounts are not zero. This is because these opening entries are actually the closing balance from the prior period, before any round up activities have taken place. MindBridge will not automatically remove the opening balances for revenue and expenses accounts, so we need to manually intervene.
Setting the opening balances to zero
We would recommend exporting the ungrouped version of the HAÜ for this purpose.
Sample of what a standard ungrouped HAÜ looks like:
All the revenue and expenses accounts begin with a “5” for their Standardpositions-Nr. from CaseWare. To do so, first add a filter to the spreadsheet by going to the Data ribbon then click on the filter button.
You will now see the addition of a button with a down arrow inside to the right of each of the column header cells.
Click on said button for the cell containing the Standardpositions-Nr. header, which in our case is column E. You will see this menu pop up.
Hover over “Text Filters” and in the resulting menu click on “Begins With…”
In the resulting window, type in 5 as shown below then click “OK”
This will filter our data to only show the P&L accounts. Now we will want to change all the beginning balances for these accounts to a 0. The beginning balance column in our example is column D, and since the first row contains the headers, we will want to change all the filtered rows below the first row. To do so, click into the cell that’s directly below the header row in column D.
Now press the Ctrl, Shift, and down arrow key simultaneously; this will highlight the entire column of data.
With the cell highlighted, now type in 0 then press Ctrl + Enter simultaneously. This will replace all the highlighted cells with the value 0.
Now we will want to clear the filter by clicking on the “Clear” button under the Data ribbon.
Your file should now look like the following.
Anything else on your mind? Chat with us or submit a request for further assistance.