Getting Started with Core Ledger
The five things to set up in your first week so everything downstream works.
Most of the friction people feel in a new accounting system is not the software. It is not knowing what order to do things in. Skip a step and everything after it feels harder than it should — or worse, feels fine, and is quietly wrong.
Core Ledger's setup is five required steps and two optional ones, and it takes an afternoon. This is that afternoon, in the order the product itself asks for, with the decision inside each step called out — because two of them contain a choice you only get to make once.
- The order is a dependency chain, not a preference. Four of the five steps have something downstream that needs them, and doing them out of sequence produces four different kinds of failure — one of which you cannot see.
- The fiscal year is the hard blocker: until one exists, nothing can post at all. It also carries a decision — your opening year can be backdated if you are bringing history with you, and the sequence only moves forward from there.
- You do not build a chart of accounts. A default Nigerian one is already there, including the lines most software makes you invent yourself — WHT Receivable, Output and Input VAT, PAYE and Pension Payable, Development Levy.
The order, and why it isn't negotiable
A numbered list tells you the sequence. It doesn't tell you what the sequence is protecting you from. Take a step out below and follow what happens further down — the failures are different in kind, and only one of the four is the sort you would catch by using the system normally.
Done in this order, each step has what it needs from the one above it. Take a step out and watch what happens further down — the four failures are different in kind, not in severity, and only one of them is the sort you would notice on your own.
That third failure — the silent one — is the reason this article puts opening balances fourth rather than first, and the reason it is worth reading the two paragraphs on it below rather than skimming them.
1 · Corporate information
Your legal name, RC number, registered address, industry, and your Tax Identification Number. The TIN is the one that is genuinely required — the screen will not save without it — and that is not arbitrary friction. Your TIN is what makes a VAT invoice a valid VAT invoice, and it appears on every filing and every piece of official correspondence the system will later produce on your behalf.
Entity type and industry do quieter work. They decide how your figures get classified when a report or a return is generated, which is the sort of thing that costs nothing to set correctly on day one and is tedious to unpick later. If your TIN is still with FIRS, do this step the day it arrives rather than working around it.
2 · Fiscal year
This is the hard dependency. Every report, every tax computation and every closing period is dated from your fiscal year, so until one exists there is nothing for an entry to be dated into. Nothing else in this list can be done first.
It also carries the first of the two once-only decisions: which year is your opening fiscal year — where your books in Core Ledger begin. It can be set in the past, and should be if you are backfilling history rather than starting from today. From that point the years form a single forward sequence: closing one opens the next, a year can only be closed once it has actually ended, and once closed, no transaction can be created or edited into it.
3 · Customers and vendors
Revenue needs a customer attached to it; a purchase or an expense needs a vendor. One of either is enough to get moving — you do not need your whole contact list before you can record anything, and the rest can be added as you go.
If you are migrating and already have that list, import it now rather than later. The transaction importer checks that every contact a row references is already on file, so contacts-before-transactions is not a suggestion about tidiness — it is the order the importer requires, and discovering that halfway through a bulk load is a bad afternoon.
4 · Opening balances
Where every account stood on the day you started: cash, receivables, payables, capital, retained earnings brought forward. This is your business's balance sheet on day one, typed in by hand instead of assembled from transactions — and it is the second once-only decision, because it stops being editable when that fiscal year closes.
Get it wrong and nothing announces it. Debits still equal credits, every report still renders, and every figure is off by whatever you were carrying and never entered. That includes the figures your tax computation begins from. It usually surfaces months later, when a balance sheet is put beside a bank statement and the two disagree by an amount nobody can account for.
5 · Your first transaction
A sale, a purchase, or an expense — whichever comes first for your business. Skipping this costs you nothing except certainty, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Don't stop at recording it. Follow it through to the report it lands in: post the transaction, then open your balance sheet or your P&L and find it there. That round trip is the only thing that proves the four steps above were done correctly rather than merely done, and it is far cheaper to discover a wrong opening balance now than after three months of entries have been posted on top of it.
The two optional ones
Neither of these blocks anything, and one of them may not appear for you at all — it depends on your plan.
Capital allowance opening unrecouped balance
Only relevant if you are carrying forward fixed assets from before you started using Core Ledger. It is deliberately separate from your general-ledger opening balances — those describe your books, this feeds the NTA 2025 capital allowance computation specifically, and the two are not the same number. If every asset you own was bought after you started here, skip it entirely — and if you aren't sure, the field-by-field walkthrough starts with the one question that decides it.
Invite a team member
Your accountant, your bookkeeper, or a colleague, with role-based access rather than a shared login. Not required to get started — but worth doing before a filing deadline is in sight rather than the week of it, and it is a great deal easier than exporting a spreadsheet for someone every time they need to look at something.
What you don't have to do
Worth saying plainly, because it is the step people brace for: you do not build a chart of accounts. A default Nigerian SME chart is already there when you arrive, and it already carries the lines that generic accounting software makes you invent for yourself.
| Already there | Code | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|
| WHT Receivable | 1250 | WHT credits, claimable against CIT |
| VAT Recoverable (Input VAT) | 1260 | Input VAT recoverable from FIRS |
| VAT Payable (Output VAT) | 2200 | Output VAT owed |
| PAYE Payable | 2400 | Withheld, pending remittance |
| Pension & NHF Payable | 2410 / 2420 | PFA and FMB remittances |
| CIT Payable | 2500 | CIT and Development Levy owed |
| Development Levy | 9200 | The 2026 levy, as its own line |
That is the difference between software built for Nigerian tax and software configured for it afterwards. You can still add accounts — a borrowings line, say, which the default chart deliberately doesn't ship because most small businesses never need one — but you are adding to a working chart rather than assembling one from nothing.
An afternoon spent in the right order is the difference between a system you check and a system you trust. It is the same afternoon either way.
After week one
Once the five are done and a real transaction has gone through, the useful next moves are about staying current rather than getting set up:
- Connect a bank feed, if your plan includes bank feed and statement reconciliation. Manual entry works, but it falls behind quietly, and retroactive reconciliation is always harder than staying current.
- Add your remaining contacts and assets as they come up, rather than in one sitting. Nothing downstream is waiting on them now.
- Pull a report you didn't need in the first month — a trial balance, a P&L — while there is still little enough data that you can check it by eye against what you know.
The afternoon, in order
Enter your corporate information, TIN included. Get the TIN in front of you first.
Decide your opening fiscal year — the year your books here begin, backdated if you are bringing history — and set it.
Add at least one customer or vendor. Bulk-import the list now if you have one.
Enter your opening balances from actual statements and an aged receivables list, not estimates.
Record one real transaction and follow it through to the report it appears in. Then you're done.
None of this takes more than an afternoon. It is the afternoon that makes every month after it faster — and, more to the point, correct.
The Core Ledger team helps Nigerian businesses get their books in order without the usual setup drag.