I wouldn’t dump it into Opening Balance Equity — that’ll just hide the real problem and throw off the 2024 balance sheet.
Since the Desktop inventory was already wrong, those “Inventory starting value from Desktop” journal entries in QBO are just carrying bad data forward. The cleaner approach is to zero in on correct opening inventory as of 1/1/2024 (from a physical count or best-known value), then post one adjustment to an Inventory Adjustment / Shrinkage account to get QBO to that real number. That correction will flow through COGS, but at least it will now reflect reality.
We’ve seen this exact issue when reviewing messy conversions (including a few at Ledger Labs) — fixing the opening inventory accurately is the only way to get reliable 2024 reporting.
After that, I’d lock the prior period and flag it for the CPA as a conversion adjustment, not operating activity.
