The Planon start date on the contract can be used to make sure that calculations start from this given date. Although the contract might be running for a long time, the financial calculation starts from the Planon start date. Depending on the moment of closing an amount (at the start of the commitment period or at the end), all financial commitments with a closure date on or after the Planon start date will be registered in Planon. Commitments with a closure date before this date will be left out, because Planon considers these to be registered in the former system. The same applies to the accounting commitments; the main difference being that the closure date will always be the end date of the accounting period. Another difference is that an accounting period will be registered partially in the new system.

The following field can be used for the initial calculations: Offset - initial accounting commitment, for operating lease and for finance lease.

In case of an operating lease, the Offset remainder for transition represents the lease accrual / deferred rent. The total lease accrual of the contract line can be set to zero with this offset.

In case of finance lease, the Offset - initial accounting commitment represents the open lease liability / lease receivable on the Planon start date. You cannot set this amount yourself, it is automatically calculated by Planon.

It is important to check the commitments before activating the contract line, the user can run the Contract line commitments system report to do so. If the result is not as expected, the offsets or amount can be changed. After activating the contract line, the offsets or amount can no longer be changed to correct the initial commitments.

Although this is a very simple way to migrate older contracts to Planon, it may be quite complex to find out what the correct offset is. Planon recommends planning the migration at the start of the accounting period.

As soon as the financial commitments and accounting commitments are found to be correct, the contract line status can be changed to ‘active’, after which the initial accounting commitments will be generated and frozen. The offset fields needed for the calculations are only useful in the period before the contract line is activated. After activation, these fields will no longer be available to the user.