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meme00
Sep 4, 2009, 11:35 PM
Hi I'm new in accounting

For myob software, imsuppose to have my opening balance to be 0.00 but it has -7k to be allocated.
Can I put under retained earnings under equity?
Can it be -?

morgaine300
Sep 4, 2009, 11:40 PM
Your opening balance of what? If you mean debits & credits being off, that isn't supposed to happen to begin with. If you mean the opening balance of some particular account, you need to say which one. I'm not sure what you're referring to.

meme00
Sep 4, 2009, 11:47 PM
Hmm I'm not too sure too? Sorry am new with this accounting stuff.

I'm given a company accoutn that starts from September ( its homework ). So I was given some amounts to be allocated.but some are empty.but I need to balances out the historical opening first to be 0.00.

morgaine300
Sep 5, 2009, 06:45 PM
I still don't know what you're talking about. So I'll just explain a little about Balance Sheet balances, what carries forward and what doesn't. And we'll see if that answers it.

Remember first that you have five classificatios of accounts:
Assets
Liabilities
Equity
Revenues
Expenses

The income statement is revenues and expenses, and that statement would be done first. That gives you net income.

Then you do the retained earnings statement. That is the beginning balance, then add the net income from the income statement above, then subtract any dividends -- that gets you to an ending balance for that account. Those are the only things that affect retained earnings.

What I just described in that last paragraph is also part of the "closing" process. That means that all the balances in the revenues, expenses (net income) and the dividends will have been applied to that retained earnings account. Then the revenues, expenses and dividends no long have any balance in them.

Only after the retained earnings is updated can you do a Balance Sheet. Go back to your accounting equation:
Assets = Liabilities + Equity
That's the same as your balance sheet.

Because revenues, expenses and dividends are kept track of separately, they all have to be put into retained earnings for the above equation to actually balance out. You can think of it like:
Assets = Liabilities + Equity (+ Revenue - Expenses - Dividends)

Notice what is in parenthesis. We keep track of those separately during an accounting period cause we want to know what's going on in those accounts. However, they actually belong in retained earnings. So at the end of a period we collect them all up and put them into retained earnings. That "updates" the retained earnings account, and then our normal accounting equation will balance without adding what's in parenthesis.

The revenue, expense and dividend accounts are temporary accounts because their balances only last through one accounting cycle (generally a year). Then they all start over at zero.

But all other accounts carry over into the next accounting period. For instance, if you have a cash (asset) balance at the end of the year, you'll still have it going into the next period, right? If you owe something to someone (liability), you'll still owe it the next day when the new period starts. So all those balances remain and are carried into the next period.

So assets, liabilities, and all equity except dividends will carry into the next period. Revenues, expenses and dividends will end up with a zero balance because they've been moved to retained earnings, so they do not carry into the next period.

As a note, in an accounting program, all of the above should happen automatically. Well, that is, as soon as you tell it to do it. i.e. you tell it to print statements, then it should do everything properly. If you tell it you want to close the year out, it should do that automatically. During the "setup" process of installing the software, the proper accounts should have already been designated.

Hopefully you can see that saying you're supposed to have "an opening balance of zero" doesn't mean anything. Well, which account? Revenues, expenses and dividends will be zero. Everything else won't. And I don't know what is meant by having -7 to "allocate." My initial guess of that would have been that it was net loss from a year and should go into retained earnings as described above. But I wouldn't call that "allocating" it.

But now what you're describing is starting in September. If that's their fiscal year-end, then it would be as I described above. However, saying "from September" makes me wonder if the problem is starting mid-period -- in which case I have no idea what they're doing. You would have balances to carry over in all your accounts if you haven't hit year-end yet. (That doesn't mean literally every account because some may not have been used yet and have zero balances. That's OK. But most should have balances.)

I don't know if that helps answer your question. Or at least gives a better idea of how to formulate a new question.