Trial Balance Report

Modified on Fri, 03 Mar 2023 at 10:43 AM

Overview

The Trial Balance Report, by default, displays balances for all accounts that have been used in an Actionstep system.

You would use this report to see the balance of your accounts in your general ledger at any given time and be able to compare them to the balances on another date.

NOTE

There is also an option to display zero-value accounts.

The balances will display as credit or debit values, dependent upon the type of account and the balance as of the designated date(s).

For instance: In the above image, Business Current is a bank account wherein a deposit is considered a debit and a withdrawal is considered a credit, therefore, a figure in the Debit column denotes a positive balance where a figure in the Credit column would denote a negative balance.

TIP

See T-account chart at the bottom of this page to reference account-type debits and credits.

Accessing the Trial Balance Report

The Trial Balance Report is located at Reports > Accounting Reports in the Financial category.

Report Configuration Options

There are only three settings you can use to configure this report before running it.

Trial Date	The trial date is an 'as at' date, meaning the account balances will display the balances on the selected date.
Comparison Trial Date	The comparison trial date displays two additional report columns with the same properties as the Trial Date. This is useful to compare account balances at two points in time.
Show zero value accounts	The 'Show zero value accounts' option ensures that all accounts in the system are displayed, even if they do not have transactions against them on the given date(s). This can help confirm which accounts did not have balances or have not been used.

Producing the Trial Balance Report

Firstly you will want to generate the report to see it displayed on the screen. Once you do that, you will be able to print or download a copy of it as an Excel or PDF file.

Generate report (on-screen)	Below the configuration options is a Generate report button. This button will generate and display the report on the current screen. It will also display further output options.
Print	The Print button will launch your browsers print dialog. This will adhere to your browser and workstation settings to print the report.
EXCEL	The EXCEL button will download the report in xls format.
PDF	The PDF button will download the report in PDF format.

Understanding the Output of the Trial Balance Report

NOTE

Using the three output options will generate the same information in the selected format. This section of the guide will use images from the On Screen (HTML) output.

Column Definitions

There are five columns that will appear in the report giving details of each line which correspnds to a different account in your system.

TIP

Clicking on an account (the number or name) will open the Account Entries report filtered to that particular general ledger account and showing transactions that fit within the date range of the trial date and the comparison date.

You can use this to see the transactions that would cause a difference between the figures in the 'Trial Balance Report'.

Account	The Account column displays the account number followed by the name of the account.
Trial Date Debit	Denotes the balance of the account for the given Trial Date. Depending on the type of account, a debit could be a positive or negative balance.
Trial Date Credit	Denotes the balance of the account for the given Trial Date. Depending on the type of account, a credit could be a positive or negative balance.
Comparison Date Debit	Denotes the balance of the account for the given Comparison Date. Depending on the type of account, a credit could be a positive or negative balance.
Comparison Date Credit	Denotes the balance of the account for the given Comparison date. Depending on the type of account, a credit could be a positive or negative balance.
Total row	Totals each report column.

T-accounts to help you understand debits and credits on different types of accounts in your General Ledger