While no two businesses are the same there are a number of common accounts that are often created when building out a complete balance sheet.

This is an account that you would use to track your cash on hand balance at a given time. Even if you don’t want to actually track your cash balance down to the dollar, you may receive payments for farm store sales or farmers market sales in cash, so you will need an account to represent those transactions.

If you have a section on your tax return where depreciation is shown, you have existing assets that can go on your balance sheet. The easiest way to get started is to use the date and cost basis information from your taxes to create your asset accounts. You can make an account for each individual item or put them in groups e.g. tractors, cars, and so on.

For depreciation, many people track accumulated depreciation as an aggregate number across all their assets. So you can take the total depreciation claimed to date from your taxes and use that as the opening balance for an asset account named Accumulated Depreciation. Importantly for depreciation, you will need to change the direction field from “Asset (debit)” to “Contra Asset (credit)” because it needs to decrease the net balance of your assets.

Loan accounts in Ambrook are managed manually, so you need to create accounts to track their balances. To do this, you follow the manual account set up steps and use a loan statement to figure out what the opening balance should be.

As an illustrative example, say you wanted to begin bookkeeping on Ambrook in January of 2024, and you had an outstanding car loan. To set up the account you would find a loan statement that spans the date 1/1/2024 - it’s okay if the statement is dated a few days before or after then, what is important is that you have the balance prior to when your first loan payment will appear in Ambrook. That way, when you apply payments you will know the remaining balance owed.

Sometimes finding historical balances can be tricky on the online portal, so if that happens we recommend you get in touch with your lender directly to get the balance at a given date.

Many businesses, especially partnerships or LLCs, use equity accounts to track how much money has been invested in a business over time. This can also apply to sole proprietorships if you want to track the cumulative owner’s draw or contributions you make over multiple years. To set up an Owner’s Equity account go to “New Manual Account” on your balances page and select Equity at the bottom of the account types menu. If you have a balance from previous bookkeeping software, set the opening date to the date your books begin on Ambrook and the balance to the value it had prior. If it is a net new account, you can set the balance to zero.