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Opening Balance Wizard - How to Set Your Opening Balances

Samuel avatar
Written by Samuel
Updated today

Overview

Ready to get your finances organized in DoorLoop? Taking a moment to set up your bank accounts properly will save you headaches down the road!

For each bank account, be sure to add an accounting start date—this is when your financial tracking will officially begin in the system. Along with this date, you'll need to enter the opening balance, which is simply the amount of money in your account on that start date.

This opening balance creates your financial foundation in DoorLoop, summarizing all activity that happened before your start date. Once set up, DoorLoop will automatically track all your future transactions, adding to or subtracting from this initial amount. When everything is entered correctly, your DoorLoop Balance will perfectly match what you see in your actual bank account—giving you accurate financial visibility with minimal effort. It's the perfect way to keep your books organized and up-to-date!

Note: Before starting the Opening Balance Wizard, you need to enter all the properties you will be managing first, prior to your Accounting Start Date. This can be done manually or via data entry on our end.

How should you set your Opening Balance?

Step 1 - Do you know the balance of each property?

If you know the balance of each property associated with this bank account and all the available funds are tied to those properties, great! That means you can set the balances for each property, and you're done. Note that the amounts set for each property must equal the total amount of the opening balance.

However, if you don't know the balance of each property or if there are other funds included that are not part of your properties, move to Step 2.

Step 2 - Is all the cash in the account related to your properties?

If all the cash in your bank account is related to your properties, then what you can do first is record what you're holding in security deposits for each property. For example, you have $15,000 in your bank account, but while you only know that $10,000 is from security deposits, you don't quite know what the other $5,000 is from.

In this case, we would enter $15,000 as your opening balance and set the balances for each property based on the $10,000 in security deposits. For the remaining $5,000, you have a few options:

  • Add the remaining funds to one property.

  • Distribute the funds equally to each property.

  • Add the funds to a Business Property temporarily until you figure out where the extra funds should go.

At this point, you are done.

However, if the bank account has funds that are not associated with your properties and you want to record those funds, move to Step 3.

What is a Business Property?

A Business Property in DoorLoop refers to a non-existent property in DoorLoop that is used to represent your actual business so you can record business expenses that normally don't fit in with your other properties. For instance, if you're recording the purchase of day-to-day business supplies or other office expenses. You can use the business property to represent any expenses and transactions that are not tied to any specific property.

Step 3 - Do you want to account for funds not related to your properties? (Not Recommended)

Like the previous steps, you'll want to associate the funds that belong to your properties with those properties. At a minimum, you want to take into account all the security deposits first for each property, followed by whatever other funds are associated with those properties.

Whatever is left that still has to do with your business, but not your properties, add those funds to a Business Property. This is a property that represents your business where you record income or expenses that are not associated with your properties in general.

However, if you prefer not to account for funds that are not related to your properties, simply record the security deposits for each property and set your opening balance based on that.

Note that if you don't account for these funds, your DoorLoop Balance will never match your actual bank account.

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