I fired up a Dolibar instance on my Proxmox server and initial setup with basic data seemed easy enough.
But to get started with real usage I need to do some more things and am muddling my way through it…
I selected my chart of accounts.
I created a bank account
I downloaded my transactions for 2025 and imported them into my bank account
3.a The transaction download and import was done before I really had my chart of accounts setup properly. Things like the expense types and fixed assets need setup because the transactions for this year are deouble-entry associated with them.
I have the standard chart of accounts for my country activated. Can someone please help me understand how to set the opening balances? If I make loan payments I need to do loan paydown and interest expense. I need to set my initial values.
Maybe I just bang some journal entries to set the initial balances?
OK, so now I have my chart of account set with balances. I noticed that when doing journal entries I do not actually see my bank account as a valid choice for a journal entry account.
Which leads me to …
Second Issue/Question - My first transaction in my bank account gets entered but the values are not being represented in my chart of accounts balances.
If I had a “111 Cash & Cash Equivalents” account with a $1000 balance and then I enter a check deposit into my “1111 Bank Account” for $1000 then I would expect my 111 to now show the $2000 valuation.
How do I get my 1111 Bank account to show up in my Chart of Accounts reports?
Setting up and getting a double entry accounting system working correctly is not a simple easy task.
The most common way to setup “opening balances” is to create an equity account with a name like “Opening Balance Equity.” You would then make a journal entry or a series of journal entries debiting or crediting each existing account balance with the offset to the “Opening Balance Equity.” By doing it this way, you are ensuring that debits equals credits.
Regarding your second issue. Dolibarr doesn’t instantly update account balances. You have to go through a step or two to “post” the transaction to the appropriate journals.
I hope this helps you get started in setting up your system.
Thank you Frank. So if I am humming along on my daily tasks dealing with AP and AR and basic banking, is there a monthly task (or set of tasks) that would take all of the transactions and post them to set them to the chart of accounts accounts? That would make sense if so in order to keep the accounts somewhat stable and free of day-to-day variations.
OK, backing into all the topics that I had previously done in QuickBooks but things are all just a little different here.
I’ll get there.
Topic Three
Seems like the banking register does not immediately present you with the account/category and force you to specify the type of expense (or revenue).
I downloaded all my transactions and the import process just asked me for very basic info about if there was an invoice and who the supplier was. I filled them in on the import and it pulled in all the transactions. Great. But there was not a clear way to say things like “this was a utility expense” or “this was legal fees” or “accounting fees”.
This is next for me.
I am really trying to do a simple Hello World example of creating a CoA and importing a bank statement then reconciling it all to show up in a CoA suitable for handing to my accountant.
This is what I have for Noob Hello World company setup:
Choose a CoA template
Create Banking Accounts for checking, credit cards, etc. When setting up banking accounts choose the parent CoA and the opening balance.
Prerequisite for Journalizing is setting the default accounts for different types of transaction.
Journalize the opening statement transactions by going to accounting → ‘record in accounting’ → ‘Bank Finance Journal’ and choosing the date range to be just the opening date such as 1/1/2025 to 1/1/2025’ and I can see just my opening balance transactions. The process of journalizing the opening balances seems to create the double-entry back into the Assets 1 account. I think that is not best. I edited the journal entry to have the second entry be to the Owners equity account.
To set the opening balances for the other non-banking accounts use Journal Entries.
Create third parties for suppliers/vendors. This will help in importing our first bank statement.
I used a third party module (via the store or via cloning the github). Enable the module and it in its options set the headers for your csv file downloads.
add info here to check out reporting to make sure its good.
Download transactions to the bank register. My module does not seem to allow for downloading without Reconciling but we’ll tackle that later.
I need to figure out how to categorize expenses and income…
I’m trying to figure out how to post the expenses in my checking account. Here is just the first transaction of Jan 2025 for example. An insurance premium.
It is in the bank register Bank Register Image <–link to Imgur. didn’t realize I could paste images into the text box.
Here is the detail for the transaction in the bank register Transaction detail <–link to Imgur. didn’t realize I could paste images into the text box
Where do I say that I want that transaction be posted to the insurance expense account?
If I go to the Accounting Posting screen I only see this which does not seem to have much edit capability Posting to GL screen <–link to Imgur. didn’t realize I could paste images into the text box
