Opening balances are what your books carried on 1 April, the first day of the financial year you start using SmartLedger. Every report and ledger for that year starts from these figures, so enter them before you rely on your Balance Sheet or Trial Balance. Take them from your last audited balance sheet, or from your old software's trial balance as on 31 March.
Choose how to start
Go to Accounting → Opening Balances. The financial year picker next to the heading opens on the current year. For a year with no balances yet, the page offers three ways to begin:
- Import a trial balance — upload SmartLedger's Excel template, or a trial balance exported from Tally, Zoho Books or Busy. The fastest option for most businesses.
- Enter them manually — type a debit or credit against each ledger. Good for a small chart of accounts.
- Start from zero — for a new business with nothing to bring over. Every ledger opens at ₹0.
Enter balances by hand
Click Start typing, or Edit balances once a year has balances.
For each ledger, type the amount in the Debit or Credit column.
Use Search ledger or code and the All groups filter to find a ledger quickly.
Watch the bar above the table. It shows the running Debit, Credit and Difference totals.
Click Save balances.
If debits and credits don't match, SmartLedger shows Debits and credits don't match. Click Keep editing to fix the figures. Or click Park ₹X and save, where ₹X is the difference, to post it to the Opening Balance Adjustments suspense ledger. The page then keeps flagging the parked amount until you move it to the ledger it belongs to.
Import a trial balance
Click Import, or Import file on a year with no balances yet.
Choose what you're importing: SmartLedger template, Tally trial balance or Other software trial balance.
For the template, click Download template (.xlsx) first and fill in one row per ledger.
If the year already has balances, choose Replace all opening balances or Only update ledgers in the file.
Upload an .xlsx, .xls or .csv file of up to 10 MB, and match its columns to SmartLedger's fields.
Under Match ledgers, check that each row in your file points to the right ledger.
The Needs a look tab lists the rows to check. Rows are matched by code, then by name. If a ledger is missing, click Not in your chart on its row to add it to your chart of accounts without leaving the import.
Review the totals and click the Import button, which shows how many balances it will bring in.
Past years are read-only
You can edit the current financial year. You can also edit your first year in SmartLedger, as long as no later year has balances. Every other past year is read-only, because changing it would change every closing balance after it, including figures already filed or audited. To correct a past year, post an adjustment journal dated in that year. The read-only dialog has a New adjustment journal button for this.
Tips
- The status next to the year tells you where things stand: Not set, Not carried forward, Balanced or Has difference.
- Click a ledger to see its details. The Activity tab lists every change to the year's opening balances and who made it.
- Click Export to download the year's opening balances.
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