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Opening balances are not trade
Why the invoices you import at migration are collectible, but never counted as sales, purchases, or VAT.
- Steps
- 4 · About 3 min
- Who can do this
- Owner · Manager · Accountant · Team member · Read only
You import 40 open customer invoices on the day you start. Your sales figure for the month does not move. That is not a bug, and this page is why.
Two different questions
"How much am I owed?" and "how much did I sell?" feel like the same question because in normal trading they move together — you invoice, you are owed, both numbers rise. At migration they come apart.
Those 40 invoices are real money that real people owe you. But you did not sell anything here to create them. The sale happened in the business you were running before this ERP existed, in whatever you were keeping records in, and it was already counted there — in last year's turnover, and on whatever declaration you filed.
So Horizon213 answers the first question and deliberately declines the second. The balance is collectible. The sale is not yours to count twice.
What that means in practice
An imported balance behaves like any other open item: it ages, it appears on the customer's statement, it accepts a payment, it shows up in what you are owed, and when it is paid the money lands in your account and the balance clears.
It does not appear in the sales register, it adds nothing to any revenue total or margin, and it carries no VAT. That last one is the important one. Your VAT return is built from documents raised here; an imported balance is the remainder of a document raised elsewhere, whose tax was already declared by whoever raised it. Letting it into the VAT totals would declare the same tax twice.
The same holds in the other direction for suppliers: you owe the money, you can pay it, and it deducts nothing.
Where the numbers should agree
On migration day, three checks are worth the ten minutes:
What you are owed should equal what your old system said you were owed. Both numbers include the imported balances.
Sales this month should show only what you have invoiced here. On day one that is usually zero, and zero is correct.
Cash should equal what is actually in the drawer and the bank, which the imports do not touch at all.
If your receivables look right and your sales look empty, everything is working. If your sales suddenly include a year of old business, something was entered as a real invoice that should have been imported as a balance — and that is worth fixing before you file anything.
When to raise a real invoice instead
Import a balance when the document already exists on paper with its own number and its tax already accounted for.
Raise a real invoice when the sale genuinely belongs to this business now: you delivered this week, the customer has not been invoiced yet, and you want the document, the number, the VAT, and the stock movement to be real. Migration is the moment people blur these two, usually to avoid re-keying — and the cost lands months later, in a tax figure nobody can explain.