Accounting in Circumz is opt-in per company. Until an owner runs setup, no postings happen, and other companies are not affected. This guide covers what to decide and in what order. It assumes Finance is already running.

Before you start

  • You need the Owner role, or a role with approve rights on Accounting. Setup, mapping, reversals, locking and year-end close all need approve.
  • Decide who will review the opening balances. An accountant should.
  • Have your last closed trial balance ready. Opening balances come from there.

Step 1. Pick the go-live date and fiscal year

Two choices at setup:

  • Go-live date. Documents dated before it are not posted. Documents on or after it are. A clean date is the first day of a month.
  • Fiscal year start month. This is the month your fiscal year begins, and it drives the year-end close.

Choose the go-live date deliberately. Starting on the first day of a period means the opening balances are the closing balances of the month before, which is the easiest thing to prove.

Step 2. Start from the starter chart

Setup creates a starter chart of accounts in English and Arabic, including the accounts documents post to (receivable, payable, sales revenue, VAT, inventory, goods received not invoiced, cost of goods, salaries and others). Companies created from the current version also have the payroll accounts, and existing ones receive them in a migration.

Edit the chart to match yours. Rules to know:

  • An account's type cannot change once it has postings.
  • An account that carries a role, such as receivable, cannot be deactivated.
  • Heading accounts group others and take no postings.

Step 3. Check the mapping

Documents post by role, not by account number. The mapping page shows which account serves each role, such as receivable or inventory. If your existing chart already has accounts for these, map to them. Do this before the first posting, because past entries do not move when you change a mapping.

Step 4. Enter opening balances

Opening balances go in as a single Opening journal, dated the day before go-live. It must balance, like every entry.

Things to align at this point:

  • Receivables and payables should equal the open invoices and bills in the sub-ledgers, which the Periods page will later compare.
  • Inventory should equal stock valuation. Note that if you bring in opening stock through an inventory adjustment, it credits the profit and loss adjustment account. Reclassify with a manual journal.

Step 5. Run a week in parallel

Post real documents for a week and look at the journal. For each type, open one and check the entry: invoice, payment, bill, stock movement and, if you use them, retail sales and payroll.

If something posts to the wrong account, fix the mapping and reverse the entry rather than editing it. Journal lines are append-only, and reversal leaves a visible trail.

Step 6. Run the reconciliation checks

The Periods page compares:

  • Receivable with the receivables aging
  • Payable with the payables aging
  • Inventory with stock valuation, with a tolerance of 5.00 for rounding per movement

Manual journals are shown separately so you can see what was keyed by hand. If a balance does not match, the difference is usually an opening balance or a document dated before go-live.

Step 7. Set the first lock date

Once a month has been reviewed, lock it. A document dated in a locked period posts on the first open day instead. A manual entry in a locked period is refused. Lock after review, not before.

Step 8. At year end

Run the year-end close. It posts a closing entry on the fiscal year end and sets the lock date. The income statement leaves closing entries out, so the year still reads in full.

What Accounting doesn't cover

Know these before you go live:

  • No bank reconciliation, budgets, fixed assets or depreciation.
  • Direct costs for farms, fleet and leases are treated as paid when entered.
  • Retail paid-ins, paid-outs and over-or-short are not posted.
  • Prepayment invoices post as revenue.
  • Bills have no per-line account choice.
  • Leasing amounts are assumed to be in the base currency.

If one of these is a deal-breaker, you will want to know now, not at the first close. The month-end close article shows how the working month looks once it is running.