Opening balances represent the financial position of your organisation on the day you start using Sage Accounts. If you use the charities option and are changing over from another accounting system, you're likely to have balances on your funds that need to be accounted for.

 TIP: You can create a maximum of 999 funds. 

We recommend you follow the steps in this article before entering any other opening balances. If this isn't possible, you must manually reverse any duplicate opening balances you may have made to your bank and the fund nominal codes.

NOTE: Before following these steps, you must set up the charities option and create your funds.

1. On the navigation bar click Charitable funds then select the required fund and click Edit.
2. Click the OB button and complete the Opening Balance window as follows:

   Bank Account	Choose the bank account to which you want to post the opening balance transaction. NOTE: This code is only used for the opening balance, it does not affect any other transactions.
   Suspense Account	Select this option if you want to post the opening balance to the suspense account rather than the bank account. NOTE: When you select this option the opening balance value on the fund record remains as 0.00. This is because the balance doesn't affect the bank therefore there's no actual fund monetary value which you can use.
   Date	Enter the date for your opening balance.
   Reference	If required, enter a reference for your opening balance. The default reference is O/Bal.
   Amount	Enter the full amount of the opening balance. NOTE: It's not possible to post a negative value as an opening balance on a fund. If you do want to record a negative value, instead you must post a bank payment to the relevant profit and loss account linked to the fund, by default 3200.

NOTE: When you enter opening balances for your funds, this posts the opening balances to your bank and the fund nominal codes. When entering your nominal opening balances, you must ensure you don't re-enter these figures. For example, if you enter an opening balance of £/€100 against a fund, and the total bank opening balance is £/€1,000, when entering the bank opening balance, only enter an opening balance of £/€900.