How do I overwrite an account or stock balance in Zoho Books?

Overwriting an account’s opening balance means replacing an incorrect amount with a new amount. This lets you update the account with the correct amount or close an existing account. When you overwrite an account’s opening balance, the required journal entries will be passed by Zoho Books automatically.

Let’s say, you have transactions in an account [For example, Expense Advance] with $1000 debit balance as on 28-02-2021. Your new opening balance date is 31-03-2021 and you want the account balance to be a debit balance of $2500 instead of $1000 for the Expense Advance account as on that date. You would have to edit the opening balance date and update the opening balance with $2500. A journal entry will be passed automatically for $1500 to match up the difference.

However, if you wish to close an opening balance account, you’ll have to empty the account by making it zero and ensure there are no corresponding transactions for that account.

Here’s how you can overwrite or close an account opening balance in Zoho Books:

Navigate to Settings and then click Opening Balances.
Click Edit in the top right corner of the page.
Click the account for which you wish to update the amount.
Enter the correct debit or credit values. Enter zero to close the account.
Click Continue.
View the details in the preview page and click Confirm.

Notes: You cannot update the opening balance if your bank accounts have been reconciled. Therefore, you’ll have to either undo (if it is just one reconciliation) or delete all the reconciliation before updating the opening balance.

Before editing the opening balance date, please check if you have more than 50 contacts (both customers and vendors). In that case, you’ll have to make the opening balance of the contacts zero. You could do this by exporting the sample opening balance file and updating the customer & vendor list with the opening balance value as 0 and importing the same. Once the opening balance of the contact is zero, you’ll be able to edit the opening balance date. After that, you can import the opening balance file again with the desired opening balance for the contacts.

You can update the opening stock of inventory tracked items as well. Here’s how:

Let’s say you want to update the opening stock value for a new financial year .

You’ll first have to overwrite the opening stock of all the items as zero. This can be done by exporting the Items file and importing the same file with the opening stock value as zero.
Next, remove the currently available stock on hand by importing the adjustment entries with New Stock on Hand as zero (The adjustment entries date should be 31 March 2021 in this case).
Then change the opening balance date as 31 March 2021 in the opening balance screen.
Now update the new opening stock by importing the adjustment entries on 1st Apr 2021 and updating the New stock on hand as per the currently available stock.

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