Pandle Update: New Data Validation Check for Opening Balances

We know it’s something we talk about a lot (all the time… constantly) but helping to minimise errors in bookkeeping is what we live and breathe. Accurate bookkeeping is absolutely crucial for businesses, and not ‘just’ for HMRC compliance.

Up to date accounts help you make better decisions, plan ahead, and even influence the relationships you have with customers and suppliers. Honestly, we could go on like this all day.

We want to do everything we can to help you get it right, so we’ve updated the way that Pandle’s Opening Balance Wizard validates data to improve accuracy. Disclaimer: not an actual wizard. Although it is a little bit magic.

Using the Opening Balance Wizard

If you’re new to Pandle but not new to running a business, then you’ll need to enter opening balances when switching to Pandle from an alternative bookkeeping system or software.

An opening balance is exactly like it sounds – the balance that you open with. These balances include things like the value of any assets or liabilities and the amount of revenue or expenses accrued in your current financial year.

Pandle’s Opening Balance Wizard guides you through the process of entering your opening balances correctly. To help you keep your accounts as accurate as possible, some information is entered as an itemised breakdown, rather than as a total amount.

For instance, if your business invoices customers and some of these invoices are still unpaid when you switch to Pandle, entering each individual outstanding invoice makes its easier to chase for payment in the future.

You don’t have to enter opening balances straight away, so you can start using Pandle and come back to this later. When you’re ready, just select ‘Opening Balance’ from the Accounting drop down menu.

You’ll then be taken to the Opening Balance Wizard, and asked to enter the date your balances start from.

Entering your opening balances correctly

We know accounting terminology can be bewildering, so the updated Opening Balance Wizard includes a new data validation tool. Pandle will now check any new categories that you create in the final stage of the wizard, and alert you if this information should be itemised in an earlier step.

That way you can enter more detailed information for key categories, rather than a single balance for the whole category which makes it harder to extract information later on.

Pandle will now detect categories that you create yourself which contain the words:

‘Debtor’ and ‘receivable’ are flagged because they’re both covered in the Customers tab, where you enter any customer invoices that are outstanding. (And in accounting terms that means they still owe you, rather than being outstandingly good).

Entering the individual invoices is vital for keeping track of which invoices still need to be paid when moving to new accounting software. ‘Creditor’ and ‘payable’ are already included in the Suppliers tab, which asks you to enter any supplier invoices that you owe.

And finally, setting up a category which includes reference to ‘stock’ or ‘inventory’ triggers an alert because this information is itemised in the ‘Stock’ tab.

You’ll still be able to create categories using those names if you need to, but Pandle will flag it up with you first, just to double check.

It’s a top-notch bookkeeping tool for improving data accuracy in your opening balances and helping you get set up with Pandle as easily as possible. All without a star-spangled wizarding suit in sight. Abracadabra!

Learn more about using Pandle to make business accounting easier. Create an account today and decide what to do with all the extra time you get back.