Trial Balance

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sat Jun 7 07:33:54 EDT 2014


>
> Well, I think my trial balance report for 2013 is wrong. It shows 
> numbers from 2012 that I know for sure I have in 2012 and not
> tax year 2012 (income from consulting for example. I did filter
> by dates (1/1/13 to 12/31/13) but I still get numbers for 2012
> included on the trial balance. The income statement report and the
> balance sheet report for those dates are perfect. All the 2013 data
> is in gnucash. I have saved, exited and reloaded the application
> and I still get numbers from 2012 included on the trial balance.
>
> Is that the (accounting) way the trial balance is suppose to work?
> Or should 2013 be just a snapshot of 2013?   Is the trial balance report
> a cumulative report by its definition?
>
>
> confused and not an accountant.

First general, then more specific.

a) Programs and data are not the same thing, independent of each other 
(and in general, not just with gnucash but most applications you might 
use). That means in a situation like this reinstalling the program is 
NOT going to make a difference.

b) Trial balance ---- you want to use this for what? You say you are 
"confused and not an accountant". In the old days, manual bookkeeping 
pen and ink on paper* the trial balance was important, checking that the 
books WERE in balance, no errors because a transaction was entered out 
of balance or some digits were copied incorrectly during the "posting" 
process. Errors of this sort were very common and each had to be found 
and corrected and there were tricks/rules of thumb for how to find the 
(likely) source of the error depending on the amount of the out of 
balance in the trial balance.

    But gnucash won't allow a transaction to be entered out of balance 
and its autoposting never copies a number incorrectly. If there is 
nothing in the Imbalance" or "Orphan" accounts then your books ARE in 
balance. Because "trial balance" was important in the old days gnucash 
still provides this report but for us ordinary users no longer 
particularly useful. That's why I was asking you WHY you were running 
it, what you planned to do with it. Assuming the report had shown an out 
of balance amount, do you know the old tricks/rules of thumb that would 
help you find the error? << I'm old enough to remember some of these 
rules, like if the out of balance amount is divisible by 9, look for a 
transposed digit error >>

Michael

* Or the more modern equivalent, using spreadsheets with columns set up 
to be the way old fashioned "journal" and "ledger" sheets were ruled, 
but transactions entered and posted like in the old days and subject to 
most (but not all) of the same errors -- errors in addition the 
spreadsheet would not make but transcription errors, transposition 
errors, yes.


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