Posting Opening Balances

If you are moving over to Expert Agent from another accounting system/software, you may need to post opening balances on your landlord and tenancy statements in order to account correctly for monies owed and in hand. This is also vital to ensure that your client account balance in Expert Agent reflects your bank account balance.

We will look first at posting an opening balance for a tenant. Opening balances in hand and owed are posted in the same way.

Open the tenancy record: 

1. Right click and select ‘Financial’ 
2. Select ‘Post Opening Balance’ from the sub menu 

The following screen will appear for you to make your selection

1. Select the date you are opening the balance
2. If there are multiple tenants select the tenant the opening balance belongs to
3. The description field is editable – you may wish for this to be a more detailed description of what the balance relates to. I.E if this is arrears from a certain month’s rent
4. Select whether the balance is owed to you/the landlord or is money you have in your client account that belongs to your tenant. If you select the balance is owed see number 5, for money in hand see number 6
5. Select the balance type – If you select to assign the balance as rent, when this money is eventually received this will get transferred to the landlord as rent. If you select to assign the balance as agency fees this will get transferred to you as the agent.
6. The Balance type option will disappear and instead you will be asked to select the bank account the money is held in (usually your client account)
7. Enter the amount
8. Save

This will now been shown on the tenancy statement with the transaction date chosen.

For an opening balance on a landlord record, the process is very similar. Again opening balances in hand and owed are posted in the same way. 

Open your landlord record, right click and select financial and then select ‘post opening balance’ in the financial sub menu.

The following screen will appear for you to make your selections

1. Select the date you are opening the balance
2. Assign the property that the balance relates to. If the balance is not property specific and just relates to the landlord themselves you can select the ‘landlord only’ option
3. The description field is editable – you may wish for this to be a more detailed description of what the balance relates to. I.E if this is arrears from a certain month’s rent
4. Select whether the balance is owed to you in agency fess or is money you have in your client account that belongs to your landlord. 
5. If you select that the money is in hand, you will be asked to confirm the bank account the money is held in (usually your client account)
6. Enter the amount
7. Save

Any opening balances your post in hand will make up part of your client account balance and will show as positive balances on the tenancy/landlord record.  Any balances owed will show as negative balances on the landlord/tenancy record.

When putting on opening balances it may be that you will be holding NRL tax due to HMRC at the end of the next quarter. In this instance you will need to follow the below work flow. 

First post the NRL amount as an opening balance onto the Landlord record:

This will then show on the landlord's statement. 

 You will then need to move the funds from the Landlord Control to the Tax Control via a Journal remembering to assign the correct landlord to the the journal.

This will then show on the landlord statement so that the balance in hand is 0.00.

The amount will then appear as part of the Non-Resident Landlord (NRL) Tax payment screen for processing at the end of the quarter.