Bank Accounts – Opening Balance, Conversion Dates and Statement Balance
When setting up a new entity in Prosaic, it’s important to understand how opening balances, conversion dates, and statement balances work together. These determine how your bank data appears and how balances are calculated within the system.
🧾 Opening Balances
If you’re moving an entity into Prosaic part-way through a financial year, you’ll need to enter an opening balance for each bank account.
At this stage, opening balances are added using a manual journal.
This ensures your Prosaic ledger matches your real bank statement from the date you start using the system.
Example:
If your bank account had $5,000 on 31 March, you can post a manual journal dated 31 March with a debit to the bank account and a credit to retained earnings (or another relevant equity account).
📅 Conversion Dates
The conversion date tells Prosaic when to begin showing and calculating transactions for an entity.
This date is usually the start of a new financial period or the point where you switch from another system.
Once a conversion date is set, Prosaic will:
- Hide any transactions dated before this conversion date from the Unreconciled screen.
- Only include transactions from this date (plus any manual journals) when calculating the statement balance.
💰 Statement Balance
Prosaic calculates the statement balance for each bank account using this formula:
Statement balance = sum of all imported bank transactions + any manual journals posted to the bank account
This mirrors the method used by other accounting platforms.
If your statement balance doesn’t match your real-world bank statement, check for missing opening balances or journals posted to the wrong date.
🔍 Viewing Bank Balances
To view how a statement balance is calculated:
- Go to Entity → Bank Accounts
- Click on the bank account name
- You’ll see all imported transactions and any manual journals that affect that account’s balance.
