Playbooks · Onboarding
No previous accountant, no software, no opening figures. Just statements.
Every new client with nothing to hand over looks like a harder job than it is. The bank is a complete record of what actually happened. The work is turning that into a starting point, not inventing history that isn’t there.
What "nothing" actually means
Three sources, and what each one is actually for.
The bank statement
The one record that’s complete and isn’t someone else’s interpretation. Every payment and receipt that went through the account is there, in order, with a balance. It won’t tell you why a payment happened, only that it did.
A previous accountant’s handover
Rarely a transaction source, even when it exists. Its real value is setting an opening balance you can point to, and sense-checking the year once it’s rebuilt, not pasted in wholesale.
The client, directly
The only source for intent: whether a payment was a genuine cost or a drawing, whether cash they took out ever went through the account at all. No amount of statement analysis answers a question about intent.
Building the opening balance
Start from the earliest real number, not a guessed date.
Get the full available history first
Ask for everything the bank’s online banking will export before picking a start date. Most business current accounts keep several years online, and knowing the real range you have to work with beats guessing where trading began and being wrong.
The opening balance is the balance on day one
Whatever the account actually held on the first date of your earliest statement is the opening figure, not zero by default, and not whatever the client remembers depositing. If the account already had money in it before your earliest statement, that balance is a fact to record, not a puzzle to solve.
Everything after that is transaction history, not reconstruction
Once the opening balance is set, the rest of the job is coding what the statements actually show, the same task as any other client, just starting from a later point than usual.
Write down what you couldn’t verify
Cash that never touched the account, an opening balance nobody could evidence, a gap in the statement history: note these explicitly rather than letting them disappear into a tidy-looking trial balance. A gap you’ve written down is fine. One you haven’t is a problem waiting to happen.
The new client onboarding page covers how Entrio builds this specifically, reusing your firm’s existing rules from the first statement this new client sends.
FAQ
Before the first statement arrives.
What if the client can’t remember when the account was opened?
It doesn’t matter. What matters is the earliest statement you can actually get. Ask for the full available history the bank will export; most business current accounts keep several years online. Start the books from the first date you have real data for, not from a guessed "start of trading" date.
Is a zero opening balance ever the right answer?
Sometimes, if the account really was opened with nothing in it and the first line on the statement is the first money the business ever took. More often the account already had a balance on day one of your earliest statement, and that balance, not zero, is the opening figure.
What if the client used cash the bank never saw?
That’s outside what any bank-statement-only rebuild can recover. Say so plainly: the bank record is complete for what went through the account, and nothing more. Cash sales or cash expenses that never touched it have to come from the client directly, as a separate disclosure.
How far back should I go if there’s no deadline forcing a specific date?
As far as the client actually needs figures for, which is usually set by the first tax year or accounting period that has to be filed, not by how far back statements happen to exist. Going further back than that mostly adds work without adding anything the filing needs.
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