How Migrated Balances Are Represented

Last updated: 2026-07-09 Summary:

• A migration brings your balances forward, not your full transaction history.
• Opening balances post as one balanced journal entry; the plug is Opening Balance Equity.
• Open invoices and bills book their gross to the AR/AP control, park already-declared VAT on a holding account, and send the net to Opening Balance Equity.
• Migrated VAT is deliberately kept out of your eKapital VAT returns — it was already filed in your old system.

When you migrate, eKapital doesn’t replay years of transactions. It records where your books stood on your cutover date, using ordinary double-entry journal entries you can inspect in the general ledger. This page explains what those entries look like and why. For the fundamentals of debits, credits, and posting, start with the accounting model.

Opening balances: one balanced entry

Your opening balances post as a single journal entry dated your as-of (cutover) date, run through the same posting path a normal journal entry uses. Each row debits or credits its account by the amount you supplied. Because a trial balance must balance, any residual is absorbed by Opening Balance Equity — a dedicated equity account that holds “everything your books carried before eKapital.” Over time, as you close periods and earn profit, that opening equity is simply your starting point.

Open invoices and bills: the gross, the VAT, and the net

An unpaid invoice or bill is more than a single balance — it’s a real claim (or obligation) against a specific party, and part of its total is VAT that was already declared in your old system. eKapital books each one as a small balanced entry that keeps all three facts straight:

Open customer invoice

• Debit Accounts Receivable (gross) — the real amount the customer still owes.
• Credit a VAT holding account (the VAT portion) — the already-declared output VAT, parked out of the way.
• Credit Opening Balance Equity (the net) — the revenue was recognized upstream, so the net just rolls into opening equity.

Open vendor bill mirrors this: credit Accounts Payable for the gross, debit the VAT holding account for the VAT, and debit Opening Balance Equity for the net.

Booking the gross to the AR/AP control accounts is what makes each migrated invoice and bill show up in aging, so you can collect and pay them normally. Each one is also tracked as a migrated position you settle on the Migrated positions page as it’s paid — see Enter opening balances at cutover.

The VAT firewall: migrated VAT is not re-filed

The VAT on an open invoice or bill was already reported on your prior system’s VAT return. If eKapital posted that VAT to its live output/input VAT accounts — or created an eKapital invoice/bill document for it — your next eKapital 2550Q would declare it a second time.

Two design choices prevent that double-count:

1. The VAT lands on a separate holding account, not the live VAT accounts. Nothing that computes your VAT return or VAT estimate reads the holding account.
2. No invoice or bill document is created. The eKapital VAT return is document-based — it sums the VAT lines of actual invoices and bills. A migration posts only general-ledger entries and a sub-ledger position, so the migrated VAT is invisible to the return twice over.

The upshot: migrated receivables and payables are fully live for collection, payment, and aging, but their VAT stays where it belongs — in the past, already filed. When you eventually settle a migrated position, its parked VAT is retired to equity rather than surfacing in a return. For how eKapital handles VAT on new transactions, see Tax handling and the 2550Q filing guide.

What migration is not

Migration is a balance exercise, not a history import. It does not bring over:

• The individual transactions that produced your balances (only the ending figures).
• Paid or historical invoices and bills (only the ones still open at cutover).
• Prior-period VAT, income tax, or withholding filings (those stay with your old system).
• Opening stock quantities or per-currency balances (amounts import in your base currency).

If a confirmed migration doesn’t look right, it’s fully reversible: undoing a batch reverses every journal entry and removes every record it created. See Migrate your books into eKapital.

See also

• Accounting model
• Chart of accounts
• Tax handling
• Enter opening balances at cutover
• Migration template reference