The Recalculate Beginning Balances utility is designed to review the ending balances of each of your Asset, Liability, Equity and Dedicated accounts from your previous fiscal year, and update your beginning balances on your current fiscal year. While this is typically what happens when you close your fiscal year, if you notice a difference between the ending balances on your account from your previous year and your beginning balances, this utility can correct this issue.
This utility does follow a few rules:
- This utility will only change the balance on accounts that had a beginning balance in the previous fiscal year. This is to prevent this utility from overwriting the beginning balances on an account that was established in your current fiscal year.
- This utility will not affect income and expense accounts. Because income and expense account will always start each year at zero dollar balance, you would not want to carry over the ending balance on these accounts.
- If the ending balance on one of your accounts is different than the beginning balance on the same account, the beginning balance within your current fiscal year will be adjusted. This change will be recorded in the audit log.
Before running this utility, it is strongly recommended that you make a backup of your database, as changes made by this utility can only be reversed by restoring a backup that was made before you ran this utility.
- To access the Recalculate Beginning Balances utility, click on the "Tools/Settings" tab in the Finance module. In the "Other Tools" section, click the button for "Recalculate beginning balances" and then click the "Start" button.
- A window will appear explaining what this utility will do, and reminding you to make a backup. If you have made a backup, click "Yes".
- If the utility made any changes, a window will appear letting you know how many changes it made. If no changes were made, no additional window will appear.