Back when I first set up my QuickBooks accounts in 2004 I had to enter the starting values for my various bank accounts. I ended up with an "Opening Bal Equity" entry (automatically) in my equity area. Here it is 2010 and I still have this mysterious row on all my reports! I decided it was time to figure out how to handle this.
You do NOT want to just delete this entry. Accounting programs do poorly when numbers are randomly deleted
Instead, what you want to do is make a journal entry to indicate this money becomes part of Retained Earnings. The way you do this is:
Company
Make General Journal Entries
set the date to a date AFTER you finished setting up all your bank accounts
Create a first line for Opening Bal Equity. Set the CREDIT to the amount showing on your reports.
Create a second line for Retained Earnings. Set the DEBIT amount to the same value.
This will now zero out your Opening Balance Equity as a line item going forward, and properly include that amount in your overall retained earnings in the future.
Please let me know if you handle this in another way!
