Opening balances and imports
Bring an existing set of books into ManageStrata — state what the funds hold, what each lot owed on that day, and import the receipts you already have.
Almost nobody starts a strata corporation and ManageStrata on the same day. You arrive with funds that hold money, owners who already owe some of it, and a run of receipts in a spreadsheet or a bank export.
Three tools bring that in, and the order matters.
Pick a cutoff date first
One date, before you enter anything: the day your ManageStrata books begin. The first day of a month, or better, the first day of your fiscal year.
Everything as at that date is an opening balance. Everything after it gets recorded as it happens.
Don't re-key years of history
An opening balance plus accurate records from a clean start gives you everything you need going forward. The old statements are already in your document library, and they remain the record of the years they cover.
State the opening balance
FinancesMove books inOpening balance.
Move books in is where both of these tools live, and it states the choice between them before either screen opens — which is the choice this page is about.
Two different facts, entered separately:
What the funds hold. The operating and contingency reserve fund balances as at the cutoff, from your bank statements.
What each lot owed. Any arrears outstanding on that date, per lot, so an owner's ledger starts honest.
Cash and receivables are not the same money
It's tempting to enter arrears as though the money had been received. It hasn't — that's why it's arrears. Entering it as cash puts your operating fund above your bank account by exactly the amount owing, and the error compounds every month until someone reconciles. The two boxes are separate for this reason.
Leave a field blank if you don't know it. Blank means unstated; a zero asserts the fund was empty, which is a different and usually wrong claim.
You can set one opening balance per corporation. Setting it twice is refused — undo the first if it was wrong.
Import a run of receipts
FinancesMove books inImport payments.
For the payments you do want individually: a fee run exported from the bank, a season of cheques, the receipts behind an arrears figure.
Paste the CSV. Each receipt keeps its own date — the date the money moved, not the afternoon you did the import. That's the whole point of importing rather than keying: forty receipts spanning eleven months should not all land on today.
Paste and review
Every line is parsed and shown back to you before anything is posted.
Read the rejected lines
Unusable lines come back by line number, with the reason — not a count. "11 rows skipped" tells you nothing you can act on, and a partial import that reports success is how books quietly stop matching a bank.
Check the flagged duplicates
Rows that look like duplicates of each other are flagged and still imported. A corporation can genuinely receive two identical cheques in a day, and that call is yours rather than the parser's.
Post
The whole file posts as one batch.
Import is not reconciliation
Both take a pasted CSV and both talk about payments, so they're easy to confuse. Import records payments you haven't entered yet. Reconciliation compares a bank statement against what's already recorded and, where a line is genuinely missing, lets you record it. If the receipts are already in ManageStrata, you want reconciliation.
Undoing a batch
An opening balance and an import are each one batch — one row standing for one deliberate act. So each is undone as the act it was, in a single step, rather than as a few hundred unrelated mistakes.
FinancesMove books in → whichever tool posted it, then Undo. You'll see a preview of every entry that will be reversed before you confirm.
Nothing is deleted
An undo mirrors every entry rather than erasing it. The original and the correction both stay readable, which is what an owner's right to inspect the records (s.36) assumes. Your ledger will show both — that is correct, and it is what you want when someone asks about it in two years.
Undoing an opening balance frees the slot, so you can state a corrected one.
The order that works
Set the fiscal year and time zone
SettingsFinancial controls. Everything below is dated against these. Corporation settings →
Add your lots, with unit entitlements
Arrears attach to lots, so the lots have to exist first. Units and lots →
State the opening balance
Funds and per-lot arrears as at the cutoff.
Import any receipts after the cutoff
Only those that fall after it — anything before is already inside the opening balance, and importing it too counts the same money twice.
Reconcile against the bank
The check that it all landed. Bank reconciliation →
Close the prior year
Once the balances are right, so nothing can be posted back into it. Statements and closing →
Common questions
My operating fund is higher than my bank account. The usual cause is arrears entered as cash. Undo the opening balance and re-enter it with the money owing in the arrears box rather than the fund box.
Can I import expenses too? Not through this screen — it imports receipts. Record expenses as they happen from the cutoff forward.
I imported the same file twice. Undo one of the two batches. Both remain visible; the reversal is what makes the figures right.
Still stuck? Open Support in the top bar of the app, ask the Assistant, or contact us.