Builder's guide · Section 12
Going live
A business that already trades starts on GAAPcore with one opening balance, dated in a conversion period that ends on the cut-over date.
The opening balance
The opening balance (/v1/ledger/opening-balances) is a document with sections. Each section creates real subledger records that later documents can settle:
| Section | What it creates |
|---|---|
| GL | Balances for accounts that have no subledger |
| Bank | Each bank account's balance at cut-over |
| AR, AP, credits | Open customer invoices, vendor bills and unapplied credits, which can later be collected or paid |
| Inventory | Stock on hand by product, location and cost, as FIFO layers that can later be sold |
| Received not invoiced, WIP | Receipts awaiting a bill; production in progress |
| Fixed assets, leases | The asset register and lease schedules at cut-over |
Build it as a draft, check it with preview, then post.
Prove it
Immediately after posting, show the tie-outs: each control account against its subledger, each bank against its statement. This is the first thing an accountant will ask to see.
Three go-live lessons
- Open assets and leases from their own schedule. Create the register first, read its schedule at cut-over, and open from those figures, rather than typing totals into the ledger. The register then ties from day one, and later depreciation runs continue the same schedule.
- Clear go-live items the way the business did. If you import the months after go-live as summaries, pay and collect the opening items against themselves on their due dates. Otherwise every aging report will show go-live bills as hundreds of days late.
- Validate an import completely before sending it. Parse the file, report every bad line by number, guess nothing (dates are
YYYY-MM-DD), and check that the totals agree. GAAPcore makes the final check, but the user should never meet a refusal that the file itself already showed.