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| Trial Balance | Used by your accountant, lists the debit totals for accounts with a debit balance, and the credit totals for accounts with a credit balance, which should be equal. Prompts for an "as of" date, and reports from the start of the fiscal year (or calendar year, if you don't use fiscal years) including that date, up to that date. On this report, Asset and Liability balances include all transactions up to the "as of" date. Fund/Equity balances include direct transactions on their accounts up to the "as of" date, plus the implicit balance changes from transactions on linked income and expense accounts up to the end of the previous fiscal year. Income and Expense totals are for the fiscal year, up through the "as of" date. The balances on this report will agree with a Balance Sheet for the same date, in Asset and Liability accounts, but Fund balances will differ because the Balance Sheet's Fund balances include implicit balance changes right up to the "as of" date, not just up to the previous fiscal year end. |
Note: In traditional manual accounting, the Trial Balance report was very important, because it could catch posting errors. In the ACCOUNTS program (and most current accounting software) it is impossible to get the accounts out of balance, unless of course there is a bug in the program! So it is not clear why most users would really ever need this report.
| General Ledger | Used by your accountant. For each account with either a starting balance or transactions during the current fiscal year (up to a prompted-for "as of" date), lists the starting balances at the previous fiscal year end, all explicit transactions on the account in the year up to the "as of" date, and the ending balances at the "as of" date. The starting balances will match the Balance Sheet at the previous fiscal year end, so all Income and Expense starting balances will be 0. The ending balances will match the Trial Balance at the "as of" date. Please see the description of the Trial Balance above, to understand what this means for Fund accounts. |
| Audit Trail | Lists all creation, updating and deleting of transactions (your Audit Trail). Prompts for a date range of the activity dates (i.e. the original entry date, or the date it was last updated) of transactions to include, but then includes all history of transactions with activities within those dates. |