Moving a young company's books off spreadsheets
How a young software company moves its accounts, customers, suppliers and opening balances into a proper ledger, and checks the move before it goes live.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Most software companies start their books in a spreadsheet. One tab for invoices, one for expenses, a running bank balance and a formula that someone wrote at midnight and nobody dares touch. It works until it doesn't: an investor asks for a trial balance, the first audit or independent review comes up, or a second person joins the finance side and cannot tell which version of the file is the real one.
Moving into a proper ledger is less dramatic than it sounds. The work is mostly preparation: deciding the date, cleaning three lists and agreeing one set of opening balances. This article walks through it in the order you will actually do it.
Choosing a cut-over date
The cut-over date is the day your ledger takes over from the spreadsheet. Everything before it stays in the old file; everything from it is entered in the new books.
Pick the first day of a month, and preferably the first day of a financial year or quarter, because that is when your balances are most likely to have been checked already. Avoid a date in the middle of a busy billing run. Your opening balances are the closing balances at the end of the day before cut-over.
Preparing the accounts, customers and suppliers files
Achekam lets a business bring in its accounts, customers, suppliers and an opening-balance journal from CSV or Excel files. Each business has its own double-entry ledger with a standard chart of accounts created when the books first open, and accounts can be added, renamed or switched off.
So the first file is really a mapping exercise. Take each category in your spreadsheet and decide which account it belongs to in the chart. Where the standard chart has nothing suitable, such as a separate account for subscription revenue and another for implementation fees, add your own. Switch off accounts you will never use, so nobody posts to them by accident.
For the customers file, use each customer's full legal name, billing e-mail and tax number as it should appear on an invoice. For the suppliers file, do the same for the people you pay: hosting, software tools, contractors, your landlord. Remove duplicates before you import. A customer entered twice becomes two debtors' balances that never reconcile.
The opening-balance journal and reconciling to the cent
The opening-balance journal sets every balance-sheet account at the cut-over date: bank, money owed by customers, money owed to suppliers, VAT, loans from founders, share capital and accumulated profit or loss. A journal that does not balance is refused, so the debits and credits must agree before it posts.
Prepare a list behind each control total:
- the open customer invoices that make up the debtors figure;
- the unpaid supplier bills behind the creditors figure;
- the bank balance per the bank statement on the day before cut-over, not per the spreadsheet;
- the VAT position from your last return and anything since.
Achekam reconciles the move to the cent before it can be accepted. Afterwards, the trial balance shows every account at the cut-over date and says whether debits equal credits, and the general ledger lists every posted line, so you can compare both with the spreadsheet you are leaving behind. If the trial balance is new to you, Investopedia explains the trial balance, the listing of ledger balances used to check that total debits equal total credits.
If something is wrong after the opening journal has posted, it is corrected by a reversal, not by editing the posted journal. That is one more reason to check the files carefully before they go in.
A second person approves the cut-over
The move does not go live on one person's say-so. Once it reconciles, a second person approves the cut-over. In a small company that might be the co-founder who did not prepare the files, a finance manager, or whoever signs the annual financial statements.
The approver's job is not to redo the work. It is to ask the questions a fresh pair of eyes asks: does the bank balance match the statement, do the debtors match the list of open invoices, and is anything in the spreadsheet missing from the ledger.
Xero and Sage connections: what they still need
If your books are in Xero, Sage Business Cloud or Sage 50/Pastel rather than a spreadsheet, you will see those connections listed for moving in. None of them works yet, because each one needs app registrations that are not in place. For now, export your lists and balances from the old system as CSV or Excel, and use the same file import described above.
Closing the months before cut-over
Once the opening balances are in, protect them. Months can be soft-closed, hard-closed and locked in Achekam, and a closed month refuses postings from every source. Reopening a hard close needs a second approver. Before a month is closed, the screen checks that the ledger balances and that no posting suggestions, unposted bills or unmatched bank lines are waiting.
Close the month before your cut-over date as soon as the move is approved. That stops a late supplier invoice from the old period being posted into the new books by mistake; it belongs in the opening balances, or in an adjustment your accountant agrees.
A note for Nigerian and Kenyan companies
Today the ledger screens show every amount in rand and the chart of accounts is stored in ZAR, even for a Nigerian or Kenyan business. Tell your accountant and your investors so the label does not cause confusion when they read reports from the ledger.
Once the books are moved, the day-to-day work gets easier: credit notes come from the invoice they correct, as described in credit notes when a customer reduces seats, and customer payments arrive through your own gateway, as explained in billing overseas customers. Contracts belong in the same system too; see order forms: internal approval, then the customer signs.
Choose your cut-over date this week, then start on the accounts mapping. It is the longest part of the job and the one that decides whether the rest goes smoothly.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
