Check the trial balance

The Trial Balance lists every account with its debit or credit balance on a date. Total debits always equal total credits, which proves your books balance. Accountants start here at year end.

Who can do this

Owners, and Staff whose Team has View financial statements.

1. Open the report — Go to Reports › Trial Balance, or use the tabs from Profit & Loss.
2. Choose the date — Set As of.
3. Read the table — Code, Account, Debit and Credit for every account with a balance, and a Total row.
4. Check the Difference card — It reads “✓ balanced” when debits equal credits, and the footnote says “Balanced — total debits equal total credits.”
5. Show every account — Untick Hide accounts with no balance to list zero-balance accounts too.
6. Click an account — See every journal entry behind its balance.

The Trial Balance with the Difference card reading balanced and the table of accounts with debit and credit balances

Use Search accounts to find one account in a long list.

If the books ever stop balancing

Spine won’t post an entry that doesn’t balance, so this should never happen. As a safeguard it checks every night. If total debits and credits ever differ:

• The Trial Balance shows a red alert: “Out of balance by amount. This has been logged; tell your administrator.”
• Owners see a banner on the dashboard, “Your books are out of balance by amount. Contact the person who runs Spine.”, and get a notification.

The banner goes away after the next check passes.

Danger

Don’t try to fix an out-of-balance difference with a journal. Tell the person who runs your Spine install: it usually means data was changed outside the app.

To export, press Export (see Export or print a report).