What does Temporary Opening Account do?

What this account do and why do i need it when I am doing Stock Entry, and calling it summary means that we should remove it’s balance

Temporary opening as the name suggests is used to adjust the balances when creating the opening entries in ERPNext.

This article explains some cases why the balance may still exist:

https://frappe.io/kb/accounting/why-temporary-account-has-balance-after-updating-opening-balances

That’s too generic a question. By itself the Temporary Opening Account (or any account for that matter) does not do anything. It sits prettily in it’s place on the Chart of Accounts.

How you use that account decides the balances in that account.

I work with the larger set of SMBs and as I migrate them from their existing system (Tally or Busy or Quickbooks), it’s hard to have a single entry to update the trial balances (and is impossible if the company wants to turn on perpetual inventory because then the stock balances have to be updated using a Stock Reconciliation document or a Stock Entry Purpose: Material Receipt document). So, I update the Trial Balances separately - like Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Stock Balances - and even in stock balances I end up having to update the balances in multiple entries. Take into account the fact that a record on ERPNext that has 100+ lines in it’s child tables takes an inordinately long time to load, I do not like to have more than 100 lines in a child table, so I end up having to make many entries (dozens in most of my implementations), before I can successfully update the trial balances for the organizations I work with. In such cases I charge all the opening entries to Temporary Opening Account.

Now, you definitely know that a Trial Balance, if correct, is perfectly balanced - meaning the Debit and Credit side amounts are equal. So, as I update the trial balances (and as I said using dozens of entries), I use Temporary Opening Account for each of the entry. Now, if the Trial Balance given to me by my client is correct, and if I have uploaded it correctly, the Temporary Opening Account also matches both on it’s Debit and Credit sides and therefore the balance of this account is 0. And if it’s not, I know I have work to do.

But I have gone off on a tangent!

Your question was: How do I figure out why there is a balance in my Temporary Opening Account. To answer that, you need to run the General Ledger report for this account (or it’s child accounts if the Temporary Opening Account is a group account), drill down to the transactions and see if the transactions have used the correct account.

If yes, you have to figure out why there is a Balance in the Temporary Opening Account and how to correct it.

If people have not used the Temporary Opening Account appropriately, you have to train people up to use the correct account in their transactions and pass a few correcting entries to ensure that the balances are moved from the Temporary Opening Account to the correct account.

In Summary: You are asking a very technical question. People make a career (and millions) and spend a lifetime answering the question you asked for the organizations they work with. Your best bet is to hire a consultant who understands accounting and ERPNext and get her/him to help you figure out what’s going on, correct it and train your users so that this problem does not occur again. And for all you know it may not be a problem.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Jay