QuickBooks Trial Balance: How to Run the QBO Trial Balance Report and Read It

A QuickBooks trial balance is a one page report listing every account in the chart of accounts with its ending balance in a debit or a credit column, for a date you choose. In QuickBooks Online it is under Reports, in the For my accountant group. In QuickBooks Desktop it is Reports, then Accountant and Taxes, then Trial Balance. Total debits always equal total credits, because QuickBooks will not post an unbalanced entry.

That last sentence is why most people misunderstand the report. A QuickBooks trial balance is not a check that the books are right. It is the compressed view of everything in them, on one page, which is the fastest way to find the things that are wrong. Here is how to run it, what to read on it, and what to do with it once you have it.

What is a trial balance in QuickBooks?

It is a list of every active account and its balance as of a date, presented in two columns. Assets and expenses carry debit balances, liabilities, equity and income carry credit balances, and the two columns total to the same number. A business with 180 accounts has a 180 row trial balance, which is the entire general ledger summarized to one number per account.

In a manual bookkeeping system the trial balance existed to prove the ledger. If debits did not equal credits, someone had made a one sided entry, and you went looking. QuickBooks removes that failure mode entirely: the software enforces double entry on every transaction, so the columns always tie. People new to the report sometimes take that as confirmation the books are clean. It confirms only that the arithmetic is internally consistent.

What the report is genuinely good for is scanning. Every account and every balance on one page, with no transaction detail in the way, is the fastest artifact for spotting a balance that should not exist: a suspense account with money in it, a payroll liability that has been climbing for eight months, an equity account nobody has touched since setup that is somehow carrying $12,000. Those are invisible on a profit and loss and easy to miss on a balance sheet that groups accounts into subtotals. On a trial balance they sit in a plain list.

How do I run a trial balance report in QuickBooks Online?

Go to Reports in the left navigation. Type "trial balance" into the report search box, or scroll to the For my accountant section where it sits alongside the general ledger, journal, and account list reports. Open it and set three things before you read anything.

Set the report period first. The default is usually the current month to date, which is almost never what you want. For a period close, set the end date to the last day of the period. For an annual statement set, set it to the fiscal year end. The trial balance is a point in time report for balance sheet accounts and a period to date report for income statement accounts, so the start date matters for the income and expense rows even though it does not affect the asset, liability and equity rows.

Set the accounting method second, using Customize, then General, then Accounting method. Cash and accrual produce different trial balances from the same data, and the difference is not small. Third, decide whether you want the standard report or a comparison. QuickBooks Online Advanced and the custom report builder let you add prior period columns; on lower tiers the practical move is to run the report twice at two dates and put them side by side in a spreadsheet, which is what most people end up doing anyway.

To export, use the export icon at the top right and choose Export to Excel, which preserves the account and balance columns cleanly. Export to PDF if it is going into a workpaper file. If you use QuickBooks Online Accountant, the Workpapers area carries a trial balance view with debits, credits and year over year change built in, which is the closest QuickBooks gets to a working trial balance with adjusting entries attached.

How do I run a trial balance in QuickBooks Desktop?

Reports, then Accountant and Taxes, then Trial Balance. Set the date range in the From and To boxes at the top. The accounting method toggle is in Customize Report, on the Display tab, as a Report Basis radio button for Accrual or Cash. Desktop also has an Adjusted Trial Balance report in the same Accountant and Taxes menu, which is genuinely useful and has no direct Online equivalent: it shows unadjusted balances, the adjusting entries, and adjusted balances in separate columns, provided the entries were flagged as adjusting when they were made.

That flag matters. In QuickBooks Desktop, a journal entry has an "Adjusting Entry" checkbox. Entries made through QuickBooks Online Accountant are marked as adjusting automatically; entries a client makes directly are not. If nobody ticked the box, the adjusted trial balance report shows an adjustments column of zeros and the report is not telling you anything.

Cash basis or accrual: which trial balance should you run?

Run accrual if you are producing financial statements for anyone outside the business. Accrual is what GAAP requires, it is what a bank or an investor expects, and it is the basis on which accounts receivable, accounts payable, prepaid expenses and accrued liabilities actually appear. A cash basis trial balance in QuickBooks removes unpaid invoices and unpaid bills, so accounts receivable and accounts payable typically drop to zero or near it, and revenue shifts to whenever the money arrived.

Run cash when you are working on a tax return for an entity that files on the cash method, or when the owner genuinely manages the business on a cash view. The mistake worth avoiding is switching between them without saying so. A P&L run on cash and a balance sheet run on accrual do not tie to each other, and the resulting statement set will not foot. Pick one basis for the whole package, and if both are needed, produce both packages separately and label them. Our guide to GAAP vs cash basis accounting covers where the difference actually bites.

What to look for on a QuickBooks trial balance

This is the part worth doing every period, and it takes about five minutes once you know what you are scanning for. A short list of accounts should be zero, near zero, or reconcilable to another report. Anything on that list carrying an unexplained balance is a real error hiding in books that otherwise look fine.

QuickBooks trial balance review: accounts to check before you use the numbers

Account	Debit	Credit	What a balance here usually means
Opening Balance Equity	12,400		Should be zero after setup. A balance means a conversion or opening entry was never reclassified to retained earnings or owner equity.
Undeposited Funds	8,150		Payments received but never matched to a bank deposit. Anything older than a few days is usually a duplicated payment or a deposit recorded directly to income.
Uncategorized Income		3,900	Bank feed deposits accepted without a category. Every dollar here is revenue nobody has classified.
Uncategorized Expense	2,240		The same failure on the spending side, and it distorts every expense line above it.
Uncategorized Asset	640		Almost always a bank feed transfer QuickBooks could not place. It is rarely an asset.
Ask My Accountant	1,875		A parking account by design. Nothing should still be sitting in it at period end.
Accounts Receivable	84,300		Must agree to the A/R aging summary total. A difference means a journal entry posted directly to A/R without a customer.
Accounts Payable		41,700	Must agree to the A/P aging summary total, for the same reason on the vendor side.
Inventory Asset	96,500		Must agree to the inventory valuation summary. A gap means inventory was adjusted by journal entry rather than by transaction.
Payroll Liabilities		9,320	Should be roughly one payroll cycle of accruals. A balance that grows every month means tax payments were coded to expense instead of clearing the liability.
Sales Tax Payable		6,110	Must agree to the sales tax liability report for the same period and basis.
Retained Earnings		210,880	Changes only through prior year net income and closing entries. A direct posting here is almost always a misclassified owner transaction.

Two of these deserve a note. Opening Balance Equity is the single most common finding in a small business file, because QuickBooks uses it as the contra account whenever you enter an opening balance on an account during setup, and nobody ever goes back to clear it. It is not a real equity account and it should not appear on a balance sheet given to anyone. Retained earnings is the other: it should reconcile to last year's closing balance plus last year's net income, and if it does not, someone posted an owner draw or a distribution straight into it.

Before any of this is meaningful, the bank and credit card accounts have to be reconciled through the period end date, because an unreconciled bank account makes every number below it provisional. If your statements only arrive as PDFs and reconciling means retyping them, you can convert the statement to a spreadsheet first and match against it, which turns a two hour job into a sort and a filter. Our QuickBooks month end close checklist covers the full sequence these checks sit inside.

What is an adjusted trial balance in QuickBooks?

An adjusted trial balance is the same report after the period end adjusting entries have been posted: depreciation, accrued expenses, prepaid amortization, payroll accruals, inventory adjustments, and any reclassifications the accountant makes. The unadjusted trial balance is what the client's bookkeeping produced. The adjusted trial balance is what the financial statements are actually built from.

QuickBooks Desktop presents this directly through the Adjusted Trial Balance report, with unadjusted, adjustments and adjusted columns. QuickBooks Online does not have that report in the standard set; the equivalent lives in QuickBooks Online Accountant, where adjusting journal entries are tagged and the Workpapers trial balance view shows them. Firms that need book, tax and cash columns side by side generally step outside QuickBooks entirely at that point and into a dedicated working trial balance, which is what products like EZ Trial Balance, Quick Trial Balance Pro and the engagement suites from CCH and Caseware are for.

The practical version for a small firm: export the unadjusted trial balance to Excel, add an adjustments column, post the same entries back into QuickBooks so the file agrees with the statements you issued, and keep the spreadsheet as the workpaper. The failure mode to avoid is making adjustments only in the spreadsheet. The next period opens from QuickBooks, not from your workbook, and every adjustment you did not post back is an error that carries forward.

Turning the QuickBooks trial balance into financial statements

The trial balance is the input, not the output. Converting it into an income statement and a balance sheet means assigning every account to a statement caption, summing the accounts that share a caption, and rolling net income into retained earnings so the balance sheet balances. QuickBooks does this internally for its own P&L and balance sheet reports, which is why most small businesses never think about it.

People start thinking about it when the QuickBooks reports are not the deliverable. A statement package going to a bank, a board or an investor needs a specific presentation: grouped captions rather than 180 accounts, a comparative column, the statement of cash flows QuickBooks builds only in outline, rounded and formatted consistently, with the entity name and period in a header. That gap is the reason accountants export the trial balance and rebuild the statements somewhere else. The mechanics of the account to caption step are covered in our trial balance mapping guide, and the full sequence from raw balances to a finished set is in how to prepare financial statements from a trial balance.

If the rebuilding is the part you want to stop doing, that is what our trial balance to financial statements software does: import the QuickBooks trial balance export, confirm the account classification once, and get a formatted income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows with the retained earnings roll and the tie out checks already done. The mapping is saved against the client, so the next period is an import rather than a rebuild. For QuickBooks specifically, our QuickBooks financial statements page covers the export and the statement set together, and firms doing this across a client list should look at financial statement software for accounting firms.

Why does my QuickBooks trial balance not match my balance sheet?

Nearly always one of three things. The dates differ, usually because the trial balance is running to today while the balance sheet is running to period end. The accounting method differs, with one report on cash and the other on accrual, which moves receivables, payables and any accrual entries. Or the balance sheet is showing a subtotal that includes accounts you are reading individually on the trial balance, most often when bank accounts or fixed asset accounts are grouped as sub accounts under a parent.

A fourth possibility catches people at year end: the trial balance income and expense rows cover the period you selected, while retained earnings on the balance sheet already includes prior year results. If you are comparing net income between the two, make sure you are comparing the same period and not the trial balance's period against the balance sheet's year to date equity roll.

Run both reports at the same date, on the same basis, and the difference disappears in almost every case. If it does not, the next step is the general ledger detail for whichever account is off, filtered to the period, which will show the transaction that only one of the two reports is picking up.