Trial balance report
The Trial Balance lists every account that had a balance or a movement over a range, with what it opened at, what was debited and credited during the range, and what it closed at. It is the statement an accountant checks a year against before anything else, and the one they will ask you for at year end.
Before you begin
- Sign in and select your organisation. The report is available on every plan.
- Figures are shown in your functional currency.
- The report is built from your posted general-ledger journals. Drafts are not included.
Open the report
- Go to Reports and, under Financial, open Trial Balance.
- Choose a period with the Reporting Period buttons, or enter a From and To date and select Apply custom range. The To date is included.
How to read it
Each account has three pairs of columns, and a fourth once your financial year end is recorded.
- Opening — the position the day before the range began. If that day is before your records on Sales Scribe begin, it is the position when they begin instead, and the heading says so (at 31 Mar 2026, when records begin); movement then runs from the day after. See Reports for dates before your opening position.
- Movement — everything debited and credited to that account during the range.
- Closing — the opening balance plus the movement.
- Comparative — the closing position at the end of an earlier period, with its dates under the heading: the year before, for a whole financial year, or the same number of days just before any other range. See Comparatives.
Each pair is split into a Dr (debit) and a Cr (credit) column, and only one of the two is filled for any account. Every column has a total at the foot, and in a healthy set of books the two totals in each pair are equal. That is what "the trial balance balances" means.
An account with no opening balance and no movement in the range is left off rather than shown as a row of zeros.
Why income and expense accounts have no opening balance
The Opening cells are blank for every income and expense account, and blank is not the same as nought.
Income and expenses measure a period of trading, so they do not carry a balance from one year into the next. Writing 0.00 there would be a claim — that the account stood flat when the range began — and it is a claim nobody should make. The cells are left empty instead, on the page and in the export.
Retained earnings
The retained earnings row opens with its own balance plus everything the income and expense accounts earned before the range began, and it carries an information icon saying so.
There is no year-end closing journal in Sales Scribe. Profit is not swept into reserves by an entry you have to remember to post; it is derived whenever a report asks for it. That is why this row's opening figure is larger than the account's own postings, and why the range's own profit stays on the income and expense rows instead of being counted a second time here.
If your chart of accounts has no retained-earnings account, the figure is shown on its own derived row called Earnings brought forward rather than being dropped, which would leave the opening column out of balance by exactly that amount.
If it does not balance
A red panel appears naming which of the three columns is out and by how much.
- Opening out — the difference is in what was brought forward, not in what has happened since.
- Movement out — every posting is balance-checked when it is made, so this points at a data problem rather than at bookkeeping.
- Closing out — the closing column is the sum of the other two, so check those first.
In every case, the next report to open is the Control account reconciliation, which compares each control account with the documents behind it.
Export
Select CSV to download the same figures the page shows, with a header block naming your organisation, the range and the currency. The blank opening cells for income and expense accounts stay blank in the file.
Before your opening balances
If the whole range falls before the date your records on Sales Scribe begin, the report says so instead of showing figures.
This matters more here than on most reports. An empty trial balance has equal debits and credits — nought equals nought — so it would look like a set of books that balanced rather than one that is not there at all.