How to move a handwritten ledger online without losing a month

The instinct when digitising is to enter everything from the beginning. Don't. History is nice, but the thing your group needs is an accurate opening position.

Start with a snapshot: for each member, one number for what they owe and one for what they have in credit. That single row per person is enough to run the current month correctly.

If you already keep a spreadsheet, import it directly. If your record is a PDF statement or a photo of a book, upload it and let the extraction pass do the typing — then check every row before saving. Reviewing beats retyping.

Once the opening balances are right, run one full month in the new system before you retire the notebook. Parallel-running for four weeks catches mismatches while they're still cheap to fix.

Only then, if you want history, backfill older months. By that point it's an archive exercise, not a blocker.