Import your financial history

If your OÜ has been trading for a while and is moving to Arvello from another tool — or another accountant — this step brings its past with it: filed annual reports, board members and shareholders from the äriregister (the Estonian Business Register), and the opening balances that make your reports correct from day one.

If you've just founded a brand-new company with no transactions behind it, you can skip all of this. There's nothing to import, and your balances start at zero.

What Arvello imports from the Business Register

Straight after the setup wizard, Arvello checks the Business Register for annual reports filed under your registry code and imports what it finds:

• Annual reports — every available report, with its fiscal year and status (confirmed or submitted). The most recent one feeds the pre-filled opening balances below.
• Board members and shareholders — imported as people records, ready for when you run payroll or declare dividends. You can edit their details later under Pay yourself.

The import runs automatically and takes a moment. If it fails, you can retry — or skip and enter opening balances by hand. And if no reports are found, manual entry is the fallback, not a dead end.

Opening balances

Opening balances are your account balances at the moment you switch to Arvello: bank balances, unpaid invoices in both directions, fixed assets, loans, share capital and retained earnings.

If Arvello imported an annual report, the opening balances arrive pre-filled from the most recent one — a banner shows which report they came from, and you review and adjust the figures before saving. Otherwise you enter them manually, grouped into assets, liabilities and equity, with a hint on each line about where to find the figure (your bank statement, your last KMD return, a loan statement, the Commercial Register).

Two details make this less painful than it sounds:

• The form must balance before it saves — total debits equal total credits.
• The Auto-balance to Retained Earnings button plugs any difference into retained earnings, which is usually the balancing figure anyway.

The cutover date

Opening balances are entered "as of" a date — the cutover date. It's usually one of two days:

• The day before you start using Arvello. Everything earlier stays in your old system; everything after lives in Arvello.
• The date of your last annual accounts (typically 31 December). You can take figures straight from those accounts, but you'll then need to import every transaction from that date onwards so the books stay continuous.

One last note: once an annual report has been submitted through Arvello, that fiscal year is locked, and its opening balances can't be changed without unlocking the year first.