Overview of Entering Beginning Balances

Warning: Before you begin the process of entering beginning balances, it is essential that you read this complete set of guides in their entirety — you must understand the entire process before beginning any step in the process. In addition, before beginning the work described in a particular guide, review that guide from start to finish.

To ensure that your beginning balances results will be correct, we also recommend that you prepare a backup system and conduct a 'dress rehearsal' of the process.

Time invested in thorough preparation can save you a tremendous amount of frustration and rework.

Introduction to Beginning Balances

Properly stated, the goal of entering beginning balances is not merely to have correct numbers — that is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The larger purpose is to ensure users can conduct normal operations without errors on your Go-Live date.

The following series of guides illustrates the necessary relationships between entities and required starting points. However, other factors (e.g. the quality of data, other data migration routines, your specific business requirements, etc) may change the general strategy. No two implementations are alike and a guide cannot replace ongoing consultations with your data migration specialist.

Process Overview

The first phase of the beginning balances process is to prepare the data from your previous software system so it is ready for you to import into aACE. After your data is ready, you will import it and create the records necessary to conduct business operations. Then you will account for existing values generated by that previous work. At the end of the process, you will create a single General Journal Entry with beginning account balances as of your Go-Live Date in order to establish a clear cutoff point and make any future discrepancies easy to audit.

Process Phases

For this process, the following links take you to five separate guides that walk you through each step of organizing and entering beginning balances data. We strongly recommend that you read through the entire process before you start working on the first step. We also recommend that you thoroughly review each step before taking action on it.

	Preparing Your Data This guide identifies the essential business operations and the related financial information needed in order to go-live with aACE. It also identifies the essential data required for your Go-Live Date in aACE. It highlights matching sets of data you can use to verify that your existing system data is ready to be used for beginning balances in aACE. Jump to the guide for preparing your data.
	Migrating Transactions from a Previous System This guide explains the steps for lining up your data and transferring it into your new aACE system. This guide covers the most involved phase of the process. It presents many of the transactions an organization might need to import; however, you can decide which transactions need to be imported for your business operations. Jump to the guide for migrating transactions from a previous system.
	Reconciling Transactions This guide explains how to identify and reconcile discrepancies between the new, imported transactions and live transactions from your previous system. Jump to the guide for reconciling transactions.
	Creating Beginning Balances This guide explains how to generate a zeroing entry which will yield a zero value in each account. Then you will record a general journal entry to create a beginning balance for each account. This will establish the starting point for your balance sheet and income statement. Jump to the guide for creating beginning balances.
	Reconciling Your Income Statement and Balance Sheet This guide explains how to do a final comparison to ensure that your new aACE system has accurate data so your team members can conduct normal operations on your Go-Live date. Jump to the guide for reconciling your income statement and balance sheet.