Trial Balance Objectives, Purpose, Focus Points, and Example

Therefore, accuracy and transparency become the norm across the entire accounts payable processing system. Together, they enable greater accuracy to support C-suite decision-making. Now, it’s time to compare your debits and credits in accounting.

The general purpose of producing a trial balance is to ensure that the entries in a company’s bookkeeping system are mathematically correct. Bookkeeping entries, account balances, and any supporting documentation go to the head office. After reconciliation, the AP teams use the balances to create an overall trial balance report before posting it to the general corporate ledger. Alternatively, the approved reporting system may require each site or silo to prepare basic bookkeeping figures to be aggregated at the corporate level.

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The trial balance is a useful tool, but every transaction must be carefully analyzed, journalized, and posted to ensure the reliability and usefulness of accounting records. On a trial balance worksheet, all of the debit balances form the left column, and all of the credit balances form the right column, with the account titles placed to the far left of the two columns. A trial balance is a list of all the general ledger accounts contained in the ledger of a business. This list will contain the name of each nominal ledger account and the value of that nominal ledger balance. Each nominal ledger account will hold either a debit balance or a credit balance.

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The accounting cycle records and analyzes accounting events related to a company’s activities. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work. These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts.

For example, if fuel costs are incorrectly debited to the postage account . This can also occur due to confusion in revenue and capital expenditure. An error of reversal is when entries are made to the correct amount, but with debits instead of credits, and vice versa. For example, if a cash sale for £100 is debited to the Sales account, and credited to the Cash account.

What is a trial balance?

A trial balance is thus a list of all the debit and credit balances in the general ledger accounts. If all the individual double entries have been correctly carried out, the total of the debit balances should always equal the total of the credit balances in the trial balance. A further important purpose of the trial balance is that it forms the basis for the preparation of the balance sheet. Such uniformity guarantees that there are no unequal debits and credits that have been incorrectly entered during the double entry recording process. However, a trial balance cannot detect bookkeeping errors that are not simple mathematical mistakes.

• The trial balance is a useful tool, but every transaction must be carefully analyzed, journalized, and posted to ensure the reliability and usefulness of accounting records.
• Note that the total value of debits equals the total value of credits.
• The net result is that the errors may remain invisible until a vendor’s invoice amount is underpaid, overpaid, or missed.
• Debits and credits of a trial balance must tally to ensure that there are no mathematical errors, but there could still be mistakes or errors in the accounting systems.
• In this instance, an outside organization such as the IRS comes into a company and inspects its books to make sure the company is compliant with tax and accounting laws.
• If the number 2 divides evenly into this difference, look for an account balance that equals half the difference and that incorrectly appears in the column with the larger total.

If you’re preparing your trial balance with a spreadsheet software program like Microsoft Excel, you can insert a formula that will perform the calculation for you. You can perform an adjusted trial balance once your book is balanced. This type of trial accounting trial balances balance contains the final balances in all company accounts, and you can use it to prepare your official financial statements. You’ll record your credit balances in the center column , while your debit balances are recorded in the far right column .

This wastes time and creates inaccuracies in finalized financial reporting. Miscalculated payable liabilities in the general ledger are concerning since the executive team may base decisions on faulty reports. Businesses with several sites, functions, and divisions often create accounting process silos. Each site, function, and division has a separate bookkeeping system to record and account for its procurements and payments. This may extend to separate order approval, procurement, and accounts receivables processes. Invoice processing improves when your accounts payable account is accurate, fully inclusive, and timely.

If all debit balances listed in the trial balance equal the total of all credit balances, this shows the ledger’s arithmetical accuracy. Although dollar signs are not used in journals or ledger accounts, trial balances generally include dollar signs next to the first figure in each column and next to each column’s total. Trial balances usually include accounts that had activity during the accounting period but have a zero balance at the end of the period. Preparing a trial balance is an integral part of the accounting cycle and closing your books.

A general ledger is a complete record of all the transactions in every account. For someone unfamiliar with accounting terms and systems, this explanation of trial balance may not make a whole lot of sense. Before looking at an example of a trial balance, let’s first clarify some key terms. Once you complete the process, you can close your trial balance. Save the document itself, which can be helpful if you need to perform the process again for a longer period.

An error of omission is when a transaction is completely omitted from the accounting records. As the debits and credits for the transaction would balance, omitting it would still leave the totals balanced. A variation of this error is omitting one of the ledger account totals from the trial balance . The basic purpose of preparing a trial balance is to test the arithmetical accuracy of the ledger.