Trial Errors Tutorial

Overview#

• A Trial Balance is a financial report that lists all the balances of a company's ledger accounts at a specific point in time. It includes both debit and credit balances and checks the accuracy of bookkeeping entries.
• The total of debit balances must equal the total of credit balances, confirming that the accounts are balanced.
• A Trial Balance is typically prepared at the end of an accounting period, as part of the financial reporting process. It ensures that the accounts are in order before financial statements are produced.

As BOS Professional is flexible, especially when it comes to editing entries, it is sometimes possible to post an unbalanced entry.

💡These tutorials explain how to find these entries (referred to as trial errors) and fix them to ensure the Trial Balance is balanced.

How to Check for Trial Balance Errors#

1. View a Trial Balance by navigating to Main Menu > Accounting > Trial Balance.
2. Next to Financial Year select the Current Financial Year.
3. Click View (button).
4. At the top is a large block: Balance with a number.
   1. If this number is zero, your accounts are balanced, and no further action is needed.
   2. If this number is not zero, go to the next step: How to Find and Fix Trial Balance Errors (below).

How to Find and Fix Trial Balance Errors#

1. Navigate to Main Menu > Accounting > Ledger. 
2. Set = Select No Date.
3. Leave the default next to Filter as Transactions.
4. Check the checkbox on the right: Trial errors. 
5. Click View (button) to see a list of potential entries with trial errors.
6. Double-click every entry and complete it (fill in the missing information so that it has a debit and credit).
   • Note: You can ignore entries with a zero balance.
   • Note: If you have two entries – one with the debit balance and the other with the credit balance – and you cannot combine them, you can check the checkbox Override Trial Balance error on each entry. This action removes the entries from the list of Trial errors. The checkbox only appears on an entry that does not balance, and only for users with the setting Accounting > Enable Override on Trial Balance Errors (see Trial Balance).