Here we’ll go over what exactly this miraculous document is, how to create one, and why it’s such an important part of accounting.
What is a trial balance?
The trial balance is a list of all your business’ ledger accounts, and how much each of those accounts changed over a particular period of time. You may have also heard it referred to as a trial balance sheet as it should be one worksheet summarizing all of your activity for a certain period in time.
Here’s an unadjusted trial balance example (more on what that means below) for the fictional company Pepper’s Inc., for the period ending December 31, 2022:
The trial balance is at the heart of the accounting cycle—a multi-step process that takes in all of your business’ financial transactions, organizes them, and turns them into readable financial statements. If you’ve ever wondered how accountants turn your raw financial data into readable financial reports, the trial balance is how.
The trial balance isn’t a financial statement itself, but all of the information that you need to create the three major financial statements—the balance sheet, the cash flow statement and the income statement—comes directly from the trial balance.
It’s hard to understand exactly what a trial balance is without understanding double-entry accounting jargon like “debits” and “credits,” so let’s go over that next.
A quick primer on double-entry accounting
Double-entry accounting (or double-entry bookkeeping) tracks where your money comes from and where it’s going.
You do this by recording every transaction your business makes twice: once in both the debit and credit columns. The debit column records money flowing into an account while the credit column records money flowing out of an account.
Since you’re making two entries, be sure to double-check the debits and credits don’t apply to the wrong account. This can result in a balance increasing when it should be decreasing leaving you with incorrect numbers at the end of an accounting period.
Let’s say your business buys a brand new $3,000 MacBook Pro.
Under double-entry accounting, you make two entries: one to record the decrease in your cash account (credit) and one to record the increase in your laptops account (debit):
Run your business long enough, and you’ll accumulate a long list of debits and credits in your company’s ledger, which is a chronological list of all your business’s transactions.
Journal entries are usually posted to the ledger on a continuous basis, as soon as business transactions occur, to make sure that the company’s books are always up to date.
If you’re using a dedicated bookkeeping system, all of this work is being done for you in the backend. It will create a ledger of all your transactions and turn them into financial statements for you.
Further reading: A Visual Guide to Debits and Credits
What is the accounting cycle?
At some point, you’ll want to make sense of all those financial transactions you’ve recorded in your ledger. That’s where the accounting cycle comes in.
The accounting cycle is a multi-step process designed to convert all of your company’s raw financial information into usable financial statements.
Accounting software handles most of the accounting cycle automatically these days. But if you’re doing it manually, you’ll spend most of your time on three steps:
- preparing an unadjusted trial balance
- making adjusting entries to it
- preparing an adjusted trial balance
How Bench can help
Each step in the accounting cycle takes up precious time that can be better spent focusing on your business. Enter Bench, America’s biggest bookkeeping service and trusted by small businesses in many different industries across the country. We take your raw transaction information directly through secure bank and credit card connections and turn them into clear financial reporting. No more time spent getting your reporting up to date, just time using those reports to understand your business. Learn more.
What is an unadjusted trial balance?
An unadjusted trial balance is what you get when you calculate account balances for each individual account in your books over a particular period of time.
Let’s look at the first line of the unadjusted trial balance we looked at above:
This means that for this accounting period, there was a total inflow (debit) of $11,670 into the cash account. Pepper’s Inc. totalled up all of the debits and credits from their general ledger account involving cash, and they added up to a $11,670 debit.
According to the rules of double-entry accounting, a company’s total debit balance must equal its total credit balance.
If the sum of the debit entries in a trial balance (in this case, $36,660) doesn’t equal the sum of the credits (also $36,660), that means there’s been an error in either the recording of the journal entries.
If you use accounting software, this usually means you’ve made a mistake inputting information into the system.
Searching for and fixing these errors is called making correcting entries.
For example, let’s imagine that after Pepper’s Inc. does a bank reconciliation, it notices a discrepancy showing they’re $500 short in cash. Upon investigation, they realize that they recorded $500 too much in unearned consulting revenue.
To fix that mistake, they would make the following correcting entry:
What does it mean to “adjust” a trial balance?
Once you’ve double checked that you’ve recorded your debit and credit entries transactions properly and confirmed the account totals are correct, it’s time to make adjusting entries.
Adjusting entries are all about making sure that your financial statements only contain information that is relevant to the particular period of time you’re interested in.
There are four main types of adjustments you can make to your trial balance:
- Deferrals remove transactions that do not belong to the period you’re creating a financial statement for (e.g. an advanced payment from a customer).
- Accruals make sure that the financial statements you’re preparing now take into account any future payments and expenses (e.g. rent you owe a landlord and haven’t paid yet).
- Missing transaction adjustments account for the transactions you forgot about while bookkeeping (e.g. a business purchase on your personal credit card).
- Tax adjustments help you account for things like depreciation and other tax deductions.
For example, let’s say that Pepper’s Inc. paid $200 in January 2023 insurance fees in December, 2022.
To make sure that the trial balance contains only insurance fees that apply to the period ending December 31, 2022 (the period we’re focused on here), Pepper’s Inc. should make the following adjusting entry (a deferral):
This decreases the insurance payable account by $200, increases the insurance expense account by $200 and ensures that the trial balance only contains information about insurance paid in the period ending December 31, 2022, and not after.
Applying all of these adjusting entries turns your unadjusted trial balance into an adjusted trial balance.
What is an adjusted trial balance?
The adjusted trial balance is what you get when you take all of the adjusting entries from the previous step and apply them to the unadjusted trial balance. It should look exactly like your unadjusted trial balance, save for any deferrals, accruals, missing transactions or tax adjustments you made.
Just like in an unadjusted trial balance, the total debits and credits in an adjusted trial balance must equal. If they don’t, you’ve made a mistake somewhere.
How does an adjusted trial balance get turned into financial statements?
At this point you might be wondering what the big deal is with trial balances. Did we really go through all that trouble just to make sure that all of the debits and credits in your books balance? Not quite. You’re now set up to make financial statements, which is a big deal.
Once you have a completed, adjusted trial balance in front of you, creating the three major financial statements—the balance sheet, the cash flow statement and the income statement—is fairly straightforward.
- Using information from the revenue and expense account sections of the trial balance, you can create an income statement.
- Using information from the asset, liability and equity accounts in the trial balance, you can prepare a balance sheet.
- Finally, you can prepare a statement of cash flows using information found in any of the accounts that interacts with the cash accounts in the trial balance.
If you’re doing your accounting by hand, the trial balance is the keystone of your accounting operation. All of your raw financial information flows into it, and useful financial information flows out of it.
