Reading Your Trial Balance

The trial balance is the health check of your books: every account with its total debits and credits, side by side. Because every entry always has matching sides, the grand totals must be equal — if they are, your books are internally consistent.

StepsCopy Anchor Link

1. Open Accountant → Trial Balance from the sidebar.
2. Check the Balance Check bar near the top before anything else. It reads "Debits equal credits" when the books balance, and "Out by …" when they don't. The Difference figure in the row above says the same thing as a number: zero means all good.
3. Set the date. Click the As of … button in the top-right and pick a day — balances are taken at the end of that day, and only posted entries count. Drafts are ignored.
4. Choose what to compare against. Click Compare: … and pick Previous month end, Previous quarter end, Previous year end, Same date last year, or a Custom date. Presets are worked out from your as-of date, not from today, so a trial balance dated in March always compares against February.
5. Read the table. Each account shows its Debit and Credit totals, its Prior Period balance (the comparison date you picked) and the Movement between the two — + for up, − for down, a dash when nothing changed.
6. Use the Search accounts box to find an account by code or name. Search narrows the table only; the figures at the top of the page keep describing the whole trial balance.
7. Click any account name to jump into its Ledger — every posted line behind that number.
8. Click Export to download what's on screen as a spreadsheet.

Narrowing the tableCopy Anchor Link

The date buttons decide which trial balance you're reading. The Filters button beside them decides how much of it you want on screen. Click it and a panel slides in from the right:

• Account Type — tap Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income or Expenses to keep only those. Tap again to untick. Nothing ticked means everything is shown.
• Report Group — narrow to one reporting group, such as Current Assets or Direct Income.
• Balance Side — Debit keeps the accounts that ended on the debit side, Credit the ones that ended on the credit side. This reads the net balance, not the individual postings.
• Hide accounts sitting at zero — drops accounts with nothing on them at your as-of date.
• Only accounts that moved since the comparison — keeps the accounts whose balance actually changed against the date in the Compare button.

There is no Apply button: every change lands on the table immediately, and the line at the bottom of the panel keeps count — how many accounts are showing out of how many, and the debit and credit totals of what's left. Clear all filters puts everything back.

Two things stay true whatever you filter: the figures at the top of the page and the Balance Check bar always describe the whole trial balance, never the filtered subset — so no filter can make an out-of-balance book look balanced. The button itself reads "3 filters" while filters are on, so you can always see that the table is narrowed.

Seeing it by group insteadCopy Anchor Link

Switch to the By Group tab to roll the same balances up into reporting groups — Current Assets, Payables, Direct Income, and so on — with the number of accounts behind each figure. It answers "where is the money sitting" without reading thirty account rows. The By Account tab is the detailed view.

Digging into one accountCopy Anchor Link

The Accountant → Ledger page is the same drill-down without going through the trial balance:

1. Click the account button in the top-right and pick an account. Only accounts you can post to are listed — folders don't have a ledger of their own.
2. Optionally click the date button beside it and set From / To. Leave both empty to read the account's whole history; Clear range puts you back there.
3. Read the five figures across the top: Opening Balance, total Debits and Credits for the range, the Net Movement (which way the account went, and by how much), and the Closing Balance.
4. Read the lines below, in date order, with the balance carried down the Balance column. The pinned bottom row repeats the debit and credit totals and the closing balance, so it stays visible however far you scroll.
5. Click a line's Particulars to open the journal entry behind it.
6. Use Search memos to find a line by its note or source. This narrows the list of lines only — the balances above keep describing the full range.
7. Click Filters for the finer cuts, in a panel on the right:
   • Side — Debits only, Credits only, or Both.
   • Source and Event — only the systems and event types that actually posted to this account are listed, so you can never pick one that returns nothing.
   • Minimum Amount — hides the small lines. Leave it blank to see every amount. Changes apply as you make them, and the panel's bottom line says how many lines are showing out of how many. Switching to a different account clears these filters, since they describe the account you were reading.
8. Export downloads the lines you're looking at.

While the list is narrowed — by the search box or by any filter — the pinned totals row at the foot of the table disappears. It totals the whole range, and leaving it under a filtered list would read as the total of what's on screen.

TipsCopy Anchor Link

• Balances show as Dr (debit) or Cr (credit). Asset and expense accounts normally sit on the Dr side; income, liabilities, and equity on the Cr side.
• A red Difference should never happen — the system refuses to post an unbalanced entry. If you see one, contact support.
• Any balance is provable in two clicks: trial balance → account ledger → journal entry.
• The As of figure at the top of the page is the date the system actually read at, not just what you typed — worth a glance when a number looks unexpected.