Trial Balance Report creates wrong Opening Balance
Description
Environment
Attachments
relates to
Activity
Carlos Ruiz November 22, 2024 at 12:49 PM
Reviewing in - at the end what I needed is easy to achieve in other ways, I withdraw my request here.
Carlos Ruiz April 3, 2023 at 1:14 PM
Let’s add flag for Group by Account, if yes then we produce opening balance per account. My be better name is Opening Balance per Account flag and Suggest to rename Group By Org to Opening Balance per Org.
Thanks - that sounds OK.
Deepak Pansheriya April 3, 2023 at 1:11 PM
Let’s add flag for Group by Account, if yes then we produce opening balance per account. My be better name is Opening Balance per Account flag and Suggest to rename Group By Org to Opening Balance per Org.
Carlos Ruiz April 3, 2023 at 12:14 PM
I see, that change broke badly our use case.
This is an example of generating the Trial Balance for Sep-09 in GardenWorld, this period has 6 accounting facts:
Release-9:
Release-10:
As I can see, the release-9 just showed one opening line, the Description was empty.
In the new format the Description is filled with “Opening Balance”, and 19 lines are created, one per each account, even when that account doesn’t have accounting facts during the period being reported.
Line 20 for example is reporting the opening balance of account 58100 with zero balance, and there are no postings for that account during the period - that seems unnecessary and confusing line, in my case.
I see now why this caused big confusion when running the report, we have 320 “opening” lines, and we were not even printing the Description column, so we just saw lot of rows with big numbers there (historic debits and credits).
Maybe both issues can be solved by flags, we definitely don’t need to extra opening lines for our use case, but I see the value when required (so it sounds good to make it configurable.
But for the lots of zero value opening lines that are not used in the report, is it worthy another flag? or just don’t generate opening line for those?
WDYT?
Deepak Pansheriya April 3, 2023 at 11:53 AM
During review, I found one issue which is not related to what Carlos raised.
Help state
If an account is selected, the balance is calculated based on the account type and the primary calendar of the tenant (i.e. for revenue/expense accounts from the beginning of the year). If no account is selected, the balance is the sum of all transactions before the selected account range or first day of the period selected.
And we are doing exact same. I mean if user do not select account, then opening balance is not respecting account type. So I think we should fix this and make it always respect account types.
Details
Details
Assignee
Reporter
Components
Fix versions
Affects versions
Priority
Minor
the on screen help for Trial Balance says…
Trial Balance for a period or date range
Select a Period (current period if empty) or enter a Account Date Range. If an account is selected, the balance is calculated based on the account type and the primary calendar of the tenant (i.e. for revenue/expense accounts from the beginning of the year). If no account is selected, the balance is the sum of all transactions before the selected account range or first day of the period selected.
Problems
(1) the Opening Balance line ... the TB allows you to select an account range but the t_table creates a single opening balance value for all accounts when it should create an opening balance for each ‘Account + Org’ in the selected range.
(2) assume we create a report with date range ‘1 Jan 2003 to today’. A line is created for the opening balance with an accounting date of 1 Jan 2003 ... it should be 31 Dec 2002.
(3) There is nothing that shows which line is the opening balance ... best clue is that it is the only line where Table is null. “opening balance” in the Description would help.
Note (1) : the transactional data after the opening balance date presently creates a line with the required columns for Org and for Account.
Note (2): Provided all opening balances are created as grouped by Account and Grouped by Org (the later transaction data already has both columns) the user can untick the 'Group By’ on the Org column to create a report grouped and summed only by Account if their Org Element is Balanced = N.