Best Practice for Modeling Balance Sheet Data in Exact Online via Invantive

We’re currently connecting to our ERP system (Exact Online) using the Invantive connector. We can access all historical financial data, but we’re looking for guidance on the best practice for modeling balance sheet accounts.

For P&L accounts, it’s straightforward: we only need the transactions for the financial year under review. However, balance sheet accounts are cumulative by nature: you need to add up transactions from the start of the data to get the correct closing balances.

For now, this isn’t an issue because we only had data starting from 2019.

But in a broader setup, we’re wondering if there’s a more efficient approach for example, by starting from the closing balance of the previous financial year (which becomes the opening balance of the current year), and then adding only the transactions from the year under review.

Our key questions are:

  1. What’s the best way to obtain the closing balances (in which table) of the previous year - which serve as the opening balances for the current one) via Invantive / Exact Online?
  2. Is this incremental approach (starting from prior year closing balances) generally recommended, or should we always calculate balances cumulatively from the beginning of available data?

Any advice or examples of how others handle this would be greatly appreciated!

Regarding table to retrieve closing balances from:

  • BalanceLinesPerPeriod: includes company, year, period and general ledger account as dimensions.
  • BalanceLinesPerPeriodCostAnalysis: includes cost unit and cost center also as dimension.

Regarding incremental approach: both approaches are used in the field. The *Incremental always calculate every row, but bandwidth use can be reduced by using only a vertically filtered selection. Performance after download is not expected to be very different, unless it is a volume over 1 million rows.

Please note that Exact Online has some specific transaction types like 310 for period closing, so make sure the figures align with the web interface.