Opening balances
Enter a migrating business's starting balances as of go-live.
When a business starts using Kiravy partway through its life, the books don't begin at zero — there's already cash in the bank, money owed by customers, and equity built up over the years. Opening balances are how you tell Kiravy where each account stood on the day you went live, so the ledger continues your story instead of starting a fresh one.
Find it under Settings → Opening balances.
What you're entering
You enter, for each account that has a balance on your go-live date, what that balance is. Bank account: how much cash is in it. Receivables: the total your customers still owe. Loans, fixed assets, accumulated equity — each gets its starting figure as of your chosen start date.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| As-of date | The day your Kiravy books begin — usually the first day of a fiscal year. |
| Account | Each account from the chart of accounts that carries a balance. |
| Balance | The amount that account stood at on the as-of date. |
You don't have to make the two sides match by hand. As you enter each account's balance, Kiravy puts the balancing amount into an opening-balance equity account automatically, so the whole entry balances the way every ledger entry must. That balancing figure represents the accumulated worth the business brought in with it.
It feeds the trial balance
Once saved, opening balances post into the ledger like any other entry and show up in your trial balance from day one. This is what makes that very first trial balance meaningful — without opening balances it would only reflect activity since go-live, missing everything that came before.
There's one opening-balances entry per fiscal year. If you've already set them for a year, returning to the screen lets you adjust that entry rather than stacking a second one on top — Kiravy won't let you post two opening-balance entries for the same year.
Don't double up with a migration
If you came to Kiravy by importing your transaction history from another accounting system — so all your past sales, expenses, and payments are already in the ledger — then your balances are already built up from that imported history. Entering opening balances on top would count everything twice.
Pick one path, not both. Either you migrated your full history (and your balances are already correct — skip opening balances), or you're starting fresh from a go-live date (and opening balances are how you carry the starting position in). A business that did the import should not also enter opening balances.
What's next
- Trial balance — where your opening position first shows up
- How the general ledger works — why the balancing side goes to equity automatically
- Chart of Accounts — the accounts you'll be assigning starting balances to