Starting balances exist only if you are transferring an existing business to Hub from another accounting system. In that case, you may need to set starting balances for customers who, on your start date:

• Have available credit unrelated to sales invoices, or
• Owe you money because of unpaid sales invoices.

General procedures for entering starting balances are found in another Guide. Read it first. Before you can enter any type of starting balance, your customers must be created.

Enter available credit

If your customer has a credit balance that can be applied to future invoices, go the Settings tab and click Starting Balances:

Click the blue balance for Accounts receivable, then Edit beside the customer’s name:

• Select a Currency (if a base currency is set).
• Enter Available credit amount.

Click Update.

Enter unpaid sales invoices

You cannot enter the starting balance for unpaid invoices as a single figure. Hub requires you to enter specific unpaid invoices, fully completed. This is so Hub can generate accurate cash-basis reports. Even if you don’t adopt cash-basis accounting, it is important to enter all unpaid sales invoices so you can issue detailed customer statements and enter eventual receipts against the correct invoices.

To enter a starting-balance invoice, go the Settings tab and click Starting Balances:

Click the blue balance for Accounts receivable, then the blue figure for Unpaid invoices on the line for the customer:

Click New Sales Invoice:

Complete the unpaid sales invoice in the same manner as a regular sales invoice. The Issue date field will, by default, be prefilled with the date one day before your start date. Edit this to match the original issue date from your old accounting system. Only sales invoices with issue dates before your start date will be treated as starting balance invoices. When finished, click Create to save the invoice.

Adjusting the sales invoice

Now go to the Sales Invoices tab. You will notice that amounts in the Invoice total and Balance due columns for the unpaid invoice are equal:

This is usually the correct scenario, unless the invoice entered had already been partially paid by the customer as of the start date. In that case, click on the amount under the Balance due column. You will see the starting balance with an amount of zero. Click Edit next to the starting balance transaction:

Enter the amount previously paid by the customer toward this invoice in the Opening balance field:

Click Update to save the change. When you go back to the Sales Invoices tab, you will see the Balance due of the partially paid invoice has decreased by the amount paid:

Repeat for all sales invoices predating your start date.

Note
Starting balance sales invoices affect only the monetary balance of customers’ subaccounts in _Accounts receivable. They do not affect starting balances of inventory items. Those should be set to match the physical count on the start date.