Opening balances deals with accounts; * A journal* is a formatted method to record the business and financial operations into the appropriate accounts.

In a sense they are specialized by the nature of the transactions to be recorded.

The (almost) universal practice defines several journals:

• Sales journal
• Purchasing journal
• Bank journal
• (petty) Cash journal
• Miscellaneous journal
• Opening (balances) Journal. Other journals can be designed depending onto your needs (credit notes journal for instance).

The Opening (balances) Journal is the sole journal dealing with recording balances of accounts from the previous acounting period (if a previous period exists). In this journal, you will use only balance sheet accounts. OpenErp has a workflow to transfer the balances from one closed period to the next current one. When you start working with OpenErp, you need to record every closing balances (from another system, be it manual or not) into your "new" booking system. To do that you will post these individual balances (your previous balance sheet), using the opening balances journal.

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You can put in your opening balances by using a general journal - see menu item accounting / journal entries . journal entries.

This way you are not limited to only balance sheet accounts - for example, you may be part way through the year and want to do a journal for each month including expense account balances.

The only tricky part is receivables and payables. In OpenERP these are part of the GL (rather than a separate ledger like most systems) so in your journal you will need to include the relevant partner account.