Thanks Ermin, however "your link" then "How to setup Odoo Accounting?" refers to the "implementation guide" which doesnt answer either of my questions. Having scoured the web and found a thousand answers + yours "retained earnings account" I was looking for a definitive answer - see above

The major point is the new accounting approach Odoo realized starting with version 9.0, which has lead to a lot of discussion in the community, and which made the opening and closing procedures some kind of obsolete.

We may have crossed wires. - See latest edit above - I appreciate that between financial years closing and opening accounts is not required - sounds good to me. But we have no account yet other than the closing balance of an old system. Whats is the correct way to input these primary figures?

The recommended way for accounts payable and receivable is to completely post to open invoices with their original dates. For the rest of the balance sheet accounts you can follow the idea of your linked video, but not only for bank accounts (you may use another journal type for that purpose) and post the balances against the retained earnings account.

Jas - pretty much as described in my answer above - it worked - Not being an accountant I find the double entry book keeping hard! My only advise is, BEFORE you move to Odoo, set up a data base, get your chart of accounts set up - depending on the size of your company the less the better - play with a database copy until you know whats going on, then play some more - especially the VAT (I still dont know :() Odoo ISNT for the faint hearted, it takes time to set up and tweek properly! Only now(tell a lie another month at least (10 months into odoo10 (after Openerp 7)) are we just about getting it to work nicely - Dam I forgot about the VAT let say Dec 2018