Quickbooks 2016 - Opening Balance Account & Owner Equity

[KateB CNC]

Newbie here - I recently started with a company that has been operating for a few years but the sole owner of the company has never recorded any form of official accounting (not even hand written) as we live in a country with no taxes so there’s never no need for anything official. I am trying to setup a proper chart of accounts to then balance all debts against investment etc and now I am in desperate need of advice.

The owner wanted everything to start fresh assuming no retained earnings as of the 1st January 2016 and has told me that his Current Investment into the company should be about 1 million but he also has a very high amount of outstanding debts to banks and notes payable to people. So he didn’t have a previous trial balance to go off, so I entered everything as I went along (such as journals for Long/Short term Liabilities increased -> Opening Balance decreased, Exact Bank Balances / Loan amounts 31st Dec 2015 -> decreased Opening balance then all the AP as bills and AR as invoices).

Unfortunately now I have been left with a large Negative Opening Balance that if I transfer this to Owners Equity I will be left with him having negative 1.4 million in the company.

Any recommendations as to what I should be looking at to get the owners contributions showing to positive 1 million?