2.6.19: Accounts reconciled; trial balance has imbalance

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 13, 2018, at 4:01 PM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 13 Feb 2018, John Ralls wrote:
> 
>> The trial balance report checks that the accounting equation (Assets +
>> Income - Expenses = Liabilities + Equity) holds.
> 
>> Running it on a single account makes no sense; it should be run on the
>> whole book.
> 
> John,
> 
>  It's run on the whole book; in the case of the discrepancy the only other
> account is the Cash asset account and that, too, is reconciled with
> expenses.
> 
>> Reconciliation ensures that your local view of a single asset or liability
>> account matches that of the other party on the account. Since it's a
>> single-account check it's quite possible for you to have all of those
>> accounts reconciled and still have your books out of balance.
> 
>  Well, haven't found an inconsistency yet but will keep looking.

Try this: Set the Start of Adjusting/Closing on 1 Jan 2017 and the Date of Report on 30 June 2017. If it's in balance, change the report date to 30 September, otherwise to 31 March. If it's now (or still) in balance change it again to halfway between the current date and the out-of-balance date. Keep doing that until you find the first date where it's out of balance, then use the General Ledger to look at all of the transactions on that date. One of them is off. Fix it and repeat the process until it's in balance for the year.

The main cause for out-of-balance on a trial balance report is that some asset has a realized gain or loss with respect to the report currency and it isn't recorded. Dunno if that applies in your case.

Regards,
John Ralls