Accounts and opening balances
When you add an account, you set a starting balance — what it held on the day you want tracking to begin. It looks like a field on the account, but it isn’t one: it’s a real transaction, the same shape as any other row in that account’s register.
Why a transaction, not a number
If the starting balance were just a stored number, every rule the ledger enforces elsewhere would need a special exception for it — it couldn’t be dated, corrected, or shown in your history like everything else. Instead, Open Net Worth mints one real Starting Balance transaction per account: its amount is your opening balance, its date is your tracking start. Anything dated before that day gets summarized into the opening balance instead of counted as separate activity; anything on or after it counts normally.
This makes an account’s opening exactly one fact — where that transaction points — not two things (an amount and a separate start date) that could quietly disagree.
Editing it
Open the Starting Balance transaction in the register like any other row to correct the amount or move the date. What you can’t do: delete it, merge it into another transaction (from either side), or edit it the way a normal transaction allows — refused on purpose, because an account without a valid opening transaction leaves its whole balance history undefined. You’re not locked out of the row, just protected from actions that would corrupt it.
You don’t need full history
You’re not expected to reconstruct years of past transactions. Most people set the starting balance to today’s real balance (checked in their bank’s app) and log forward from there — the app doesn’t care how far back your history goes, only that today’s number is right.