How do I enter my beginning of year inventory balance?

Entering the beginning of year inventory balance will depend on whether you have inventory purchase and cost of goods sold transactions from prior year.

Starting fresh

Let's start with the easiest scenario. If you are a brand new user of Seller Ledger, and have no transactions from prior years, you would simply go to the Inventory tab and select the "Add inventory" button. Select Dec 31 of the prior year and enter the total value of your inventory costs. For "Purchased from" you can enter whatever you like - perhaps something descriptive like "Opening inventory balance - 2023"

A mixture of data

Let's say you've been using Seller Ledger across multiple years, or have gone ahead and entered some older Inventory purchases. In this case, go to the prior year and look at the "Current balance" number. This will reflect the balance of your inventory account based on the transactions that we know about. Assuming you have counted up the value of your inventory from the end of last year and see that's it's higher than what Seller Ledger shows, it means all you have to do is "add inventory" in an amount that equals the difference between what Seller Ledger shows and what you counted.

For example, let's say you go back to 2022 and see that there's a "Current Balance" of $350, representing some, but not all of your inventory. Now let's say, when you did your inventory count on Dec 31, you found that you have $800 in inventory. All you would need to do to gets your books in order would be to click the "Add Inventory" button, and enter an inventory purchase for 12/31/22 in an amount of $450. You would immediately see the "Current Balance" for 2022 update to $800, and when changing the year to 2023, you would also see an $800 balance under "Beginning Balance"

In fact, you can even go back and enter older inventory.