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Last updated on Aug 28, 2026
Open Balance shortens onboarding by letting you migrate legacy data as summary balances instead of rebuilding every historical Transaction. You choose a cutover month, enter your Deferred Revenue and Unbilled Accrued Revenue balances at the account level, and then add detail only where you want it by creating Transactions.
You can still migrate the full detail instead, by creating Transactions for all historical data. That approach is accurate but time-consuming, and Open Balance exists to give you a faster option.
Open Balance is at Admin > Utilities > Open Balance. It must be enabled for your account, and every screen in the utility requires Administrator rights.
Open Balance amounts appear in two Finance reports: Advanced Revenue Summary and Contract Details. Both are built around Open Balance, and both hide it by default — see Step 3: Include Open Balance in reports. Subscription Momentum reports, MRR, and ARR are driven by Transactions, so they need real Transactions to show the balances you expect.
Once you have configured Open Balance, use the Open Balance Diagnostic Report to compare Open Balance amounts by account pairing against the Transactions allocated to those pairings for Revenue, Deferred Revenue, and Unbilled Accrued Revenue.
One naming caution: Total Open Balance on a Customer or Contract record is the total balance of all open Invoices. That is an accounts receivable figure and has nothing to do with this utility.
The home screen carries up to four tabs — DM Plan, Reconciliation, Audit Information, and Notes — plus an Invoicing and Revenue summary of the balances you have entered.
Two of the tabs appear as you go. Reconciliation appears once you have configured the data migration plan. Audit Information appears once at least one amount has been entered or imported.
Shows the dates from your data migration plan: Cutover Date, Open Balance Revenue Start Date, and Open Balance Revenue End Date. Configure reopens the plan, which an Administrator can edit later within the limits described in Step 1.
Three pre-filtered checks, each with a count and an amount, that tell you whether your Open Balance and your Transactions agree:
Each check links to the matching list, so you can work straight from it.
Shows Modified and Modified By for the most recent change to any Open Balance amount, whether it was entered by hand or imported. Useful when several people are entering data.
Record and share notes about the migration — changes to the plan, or something to come back to. Each note is stamped with its author and the date it was created. Add Note adds one.
Start by setting the dates that govern the whole migration.
The revenue date range is how long it will take to recognize the Deferred Revenue balance you hold as of the cutover date. Any Unbilled Accrued Revenue balance is also as of the cutover date.
You choose a cutover month, not a day. Maxio treats the last day of that month as the cutover date and starts the revenue date range on the first day of the following month. Choosing December 2021, for example, gives a cutover date of 12/31/2021 and a revenue start date of 01/01/2022. That is why Start is shown as text rather than a field — it follows from the cutover month and cannot be set directly. The end of the range cannot fall before the start.
An Administrator can revisit these dates later with Configure, but not freely once amounts exist. You cannot move the start date past your earliest entry, you cannot pull the end date in ahead of your latest entry, and you cannot turn Open Balance off at all while any entries remain. Maxio reports the blocking entry in each case.
With the dates set, enter your Deferred Revenue balance and its recognition schedule by account, and your Unbilled Accrued Revenue balance as of the cutover date.
At the top right of the Open Balance screen, open the Build menu and select:
You need at least one Register before you can build. Each builder works on one Register at a time, so with more than one you choose the Register first; with only one, Maxio takes you straight to the builder.
Every builder screen has three controls in the top right: Import opens the importer for that kind of entry, Accounts reopens Select Accounts, and Open Balance Home returns to the home screen.
Select the Register you want to enter a Deferred Revenue balance for. The input dates come from your data migration plan.
Next, choose the accounts that will be part of Open Balance reporting. Select Accounts has two selectors, both drawn from your Chart of Accounts: Liability Accounts, for the Deferred Revenue you are migrating, and Income Accounts, for the accounts that revenue will be recognized into.
In each selector, use the right arrow (>) to move an account into the selected list, then the up and down arrows to order it. The double up arrows send an account to the top.
Click Submit, and the Deferred Revenue builder opens with the accounts you chose. It shows one column per month across the revenue date range, a Deferred Revenue field for the balance as of the cutover date, and a row for each income account.
Enter the Deferred Revenue balance as of the cutover date, then enter the revenue to recognize in each month. The Totals row and the running Deferred Revenue row are calculated as you type, so you can see the balance draw down. Enter the amounts the way you want to report on them, whether that is by Customer Contract or by Customer.
Every month needs a value; enter 0 for months with no revenue. Negative amounts are not accepted — Maxio resets the field to 0.
The Deferred Revenue balance must equal the total revenue you recognize, because the balance is not stored separately: it is the sum of the monthly amounts. When the two agree, the running Deferred Revenue row turns green and you can submit. If a month recognizes more than the remaining balance, the row is flagged instead, showing where you have gone past it.
Example for Deferred Revenue
Here the Deferred Revenue balance for the Deferred Revenue account is $14,000 as of 12/31/2021, recognized over 11 months across two income accounts, Subscription Income and Services Income. The running row reaches 0 in the final month, so the entry is in balance.
Once the amounts are submitted, they flow into the Advanced Revenue Summary and Contract Details reports, and the Open Balance home screen shows an Advanced Revenue Summary of them, filtered to Only Open Balance.
Click Open Balance Home to go back. To remove an entry, select the checkbox beside its trash icon in the builder and submit.
Unbilled Accrued Revenue works the same way, with two differences: Select Accounts offers asset accounts, and there is no recognition schedule — you enter a single Amount as of the cutover date.
Example for Unbilled Accrued Revenue
Here there is a $1,000 Unbilled AR balance for the Unbilled AR account as of 12/31/2021.
Click Open Balance Home to go back. The Unbilled AR balance now appears in the summary.
Instead of entering amounts by hand, use the Importer, or the Import link on either builder screen:
Both support Create, Update, and Create & Update imports, and both offer a sample template to download. The Open Balance Transaction and Invoice Line Item fields can be imported too.
Importing is only available once the data migration plan is configured. You do not have to select accounts first — importing adds the accounts it uses to your selection for you.
Both the Advanced Revenue Summary and Contract Details reports carry an Open Balance Handling setting, with three options:
Exclude Open Balance is the default, so a report you have not changed will not show the balances you entered. Set it to Include Open Balance or Only Open Balance to see them.
Run with the amounts from the example above, the Advanced Revenue Summary looks like this.
Drilling into any bucket, such as Recognizable Revenue for Period or a single account, opens a detail view built from the Contract Details report. Open Balance amounts are labeled Open Balance in the left-hand columns, in place of a customer and contract, so you can see at a glance that the balance is made up of them.
To include Open Balance in a Contract Details report, add the Item Account, the Item Name, or both to Calculate By.
You can add detail to your Open Balance amounts by creating Transactions and Invoice Line Items and marking them as part of the balances you already entered. This is worth doing for any part of the migrated data you want to see at a granular level.
For example, you might build Transactions only for the contracts that are mid-term at cutover, so you know when they renew.
To do this, select Included in Open Balance for the Transaction and for its Invoice Line Item.
Any Transaction included in Open Balance must be in balance for reporting to be accurate.
For Invoice Line Items before the cutover date that you do not plan to build out with Transactions, select Exclude from Reports. Their amounts stay in the Open Balance and are not counted a second time in the Advanced Revenue Summary and Contract Details reports.
Continuing the example, you add Transaction detail for part of the Open Balance you entered: a Transaction and Invoice Line Item for $3,000 spanning 12/1/2021 to 11/30/2022, recognized evenly by month, both marked Included in Open Balance.
Rerun the Advanced Revenue Summary. Within the Open Balance revenue date range the totals per account are unchanged — January through November 2022 still comes to $14,000 — because you marked the Transaction as part of the balance rather than as new revenue on top of it. What is new is the detail: the Transaction's Invoicing now appears, and the $250 it recognizes in December 2021 is added, since that month falls before the revenue date range starts.
Drilling into Revenue, Deferred Revenue, or Unbilled AR shows how the balance is now split. The Open Balance bucket is reduced by the Transaction's share rather than sitting alongside it.
The revenue schedule from January to December 2022 still matches what you entered in the builder. Subscription Income is now split into $250 a month recognized for Customer A, leaving $750 a month in the Open Balance bucket.
Which accounts the Open Balance totals are drawn down from depends on the accounts assigned to the Items used in the Transactions and Invoice Line Items you included.
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