An opening on the day of the takeover, with its open items

Status: accepted

Context

Books are rarely taken over on the first day of a year. A company changes software when its contract ends, and arrives with the trial balance of the day before and the list of invoices still open — each with its number, the structured reference its customer will quote, its due date. An opening that only knows the first day of a year refuses the first, and an opening made of lines keeps the second only as one amount per party: when the customer pays, statement matching has no number and no reference to find.

Decision

The opening takes a day. opening_balance() takes p_opening_date, any day of the fiscal year, its first day when left out. The opening entry is dated there. What the previous system booked from the first day of the year to the day before arrives in the opening entry itself — the income and expense accounts at their figure of that day, under p_allow_result_accounts — and nothing of these books is dated before it. A year still holds one opening.

An open item is a document. p_items lists the sale and purchase invoices and credit notes still open: type, number, contact, amount still open, date of issue, due date, payment reference, supplier reference. Each is written as a draft and posted by post_document(), the one way a document is posted, on the opening journal and on the opening day, while its document_date keeps the day it was issued. Its one line carries no tax and names the suspense account the pack names under defaults.roles.suspense. Its entry therefore puts the amount on the receivable or payable of its contact, with the due date as maturity, against that account. Nothing is booked to revenue, expense or tax again: the sale is in the opening already, and its tax was declared by whoever kept the books then. open_items(), suggest_matches(), settle_from_statement() and reconcile() read these documents the way they read one issued here, because they are the same kind of row.

An account the items fall on is carried by its items. The balance says what the receivable account holds; the items say who owes it. The lines of the balance on such an account are written on the suspense account instead, and the items, each booked against the suspense account, put the amount back on the receivable or payable, by contact. The suspense account comes out at nothing. An account whose items do not add up to its line of the balance is refused, opening_items_unbalanced: the open items of an account are its whole balance, and an aged balance that disagrees with the trial balance is the first thing to settle at a takeover, not something to book. The account an item falls on is the one post_document() will book it on, resolve_counterpart_account() of its contact, so the check and the entry cannot disagree.

One function, not a second one. The items are new arguments of opening_balance() rather than an opening_items() beside it. They are checked against the lines of the balance and written in the transaction that writes the opening entry. A separate function would have to find an opening already posted and check against it in a second call over the API — a second transaction, and an opening that stands for a moment without its items, or for ever if the second call fails. The arguments come last and default to null, so a call written for the first four reads the same.

Refused by name, before anything is written: a type that is not an invoice or a credit note, a missing number, a number already a document of its type in the company or twice in the list, a contact of another company, an amount that is not positive, an item issued after the opening day or due before it was issued, an opening day outside the year, a company with no suspense account.

The import takes the same. import_books() dates the opening on the day the files give and passes opening.items on, each naming its contact by the key of the files. @ekwo-ai/trial-balance reads the list as CSV (readOpenItems()), and ekwo import trial-balance … --open-items and the import_books tool carry it.

Consequences

A trial balance or a statement of the whole year reads what the previous system held plus what was booked since. One that ends the day before the takeover reads nothing. One that starts on or after it reads the year-to-date figures as a movement of the period the takeover falls in.
A tax return reads none of it: the opening and its items carry no tax and no box. The returns of the months before the takeover were filed from the previous system.
The audit file of the year of a takeover carries the opening entry among the movements of the year, on the opening journal, and the open items as the entries of their documents.
An open item is in the currency of the company. An item in another currency is not taken yet.
Where a chart keeps its suspense account reconcilable, the lines the opening and its items write on it are matched against each other by reconcile() in the same transaction, so none is left among the open items. The opening then needs reconcile.write besides entries.post, documents.write and documents.post.

An opening on the day of the takeover, with its open items

Context

Decision

Consequences

See also