Opening Cash Mismatch

If you are seeing an opening cash mismatch error when setting up your ExpensePlus Opening Balances, this support article provides guidance on some of the most common scenarios and what to do.

At the end of your prior financial year, the cash total for all your funds shown on your balance sheet is made up of the cash held across all your bank and petty cash accounts.

The error message shown above appears when these totals do not match. If you are part way through setting up your opening balances, then you can ignore this message. However, if you have completed the setup of your funds and bank accounts, then here is a list of possible reasons for the mismatch and how to correct for these.

Possible Reasons

1. Data Entry Error

You've wrongly entered a number on the Opening Balance Sheet Information when adding your bank or petty cash account opening balances.

We recommend that before you do anything else, you double check that you have entered all of your bank and petty cash opening balances correctly.

• It's easy to enter £10305.92 as £10405.92 (transposing two digits).
• It's also worth checking that bank balances are as they were at the end of your prior financial year (not at the end of the first day of your new financial year).
• Similarly, it's worth checking the figures entered from your balance sheet onto the Balance Sheet Information screen are also correct.

2. Rounding Error

You have correctly entered non-rounded amounts for your bank and petty cash balances, but rounded amounts on the Opening Balance Sheet Information screen.

If the mismatch amount is less than £5, then it's likely this is your issue. 

Updating your Opening Balance Sheet Information cash total to match the non-rounded amount of your total bank and petty cash totals will fix the issue.

3. Error in Prior Year Accounts

Where this is the case, if you spot the error before closing your prior year accounts, you should look to correct for this within your last year accounts, and then make the corresponding update within the Opening Balance Sheet Information screen.

If your prior year accounts are already closed, it's important that when setting up ExpensePlus you go with the balances from your end of year accounts, correcting where necessary.

The same figures used to create your prior year accounts should be used as your bank and petty cash account balances. Then you need to manually upload a paid in or paid out transaction to the account within ExpensePlus on the first day of the new financial year and matched this. You should flag this to your independent examiner.

4. Adjustment for uncleared monies in your prior year accounts

In your prior year accounts, the person who made this adjustment has essentially reached into your new financial year and 'moved' bank transactions that will appear in your current financial year bank statement back into your prior financial year.

You will need to similarly mirror this by

(a) using the bank account balances used in your prior year accounts (rather than your actual bank account balances);

(b) when these transactions appear in your current financial year, delete them from the uploaded statement.

When you do this, you need to be aware that at the start of your financial year within ExpensePlus, the bank balance shown within ExpensePlus isn't going to match your actual bank statement balance as it typically would. However, once all such adjusted items have appeared on your bank statement (and been deleted as suggested), then the bank account balance within ExpensePlus will return to matching your actual bank statement balance.

5. Credit Card Account

To fix this you need to update your opening cash balance for your credit card account within the Bank Settings screen to be zero (to match your accounts).

You will also need to split the first direct debit payment that appears on your bank statement within ExpensePlus into two amounts - one amount to match the credit card balance you accrued for in your prior year accounts, and the second part the remainder of the credit card balance payment total.

To do this, you will need to delete the transaction (using the delete button on the right of the transaction on the view statement screen), then click 'upload transactions' at the top of the screen and select the manual upload button at the bottom of the upload popup.

When bank matching, the first of the two parts should be recorded as an accounts payable opening balance reversal (this represents the debt in your last year accounts being paid), the second part as a transfer between accounts to your credit card account (as the full amount will be recorded going forwards).