Troubleshooting for Out of Balance Transactions for Financial Statements and Trial Balance
Financial Statements Out of Balance but SN-13 Trial Balance Balances
If you use financial statements and notice that your P&L number doesn’t match the profit and loss on the balance sheet or the balance sheet doesn’t balance then you should first investigate the GL-13 trial balance to see if there is a balance at the end of the sheet. If it shows $0 then there is simply GLs being missed on the custom created financial statements or GLs being duplicated. You will have to investigate this by exporting the GL-13 trial balance to Excel and then compare against the printed financial statement from GL>Financial Statements>Maintenance.
You will then have to go through the GLs 1 by 1 to see what is missing or what is duplicated. It is recommended to cross out or highlight the GLs on the trial balance as a check and balance while you work through the sheet to find what is missing or additional. If you do not know how to add or remove GLs from the financial statements then please review the below article or reach out to our Support team.
https://help.epass.software/help/General%20Ledger/FinancialStatements/
Financial Statements and Trial Balance are Out of Balance
If you do notice that there is a balance at the end of the GL-13 Trial Balance then there was an out of balance entry done at some point. The first thing you should do is check the posting history in GL and sort by the amount to see if there are any postings that have a balance other than $0.
If you find a balance then you will need to go into the posting and determine how the entry should be corrected. You will then eventually need to do an out of balance entry to correct the previous out of balance. Please scroll down to “How to Do an Out of Balance Entry to Correct Previous Out of Balance” to correct this.
If you didn’t notice that there is a balance at the end of the GL-13 then it’ll be due to unposted transactions that is causing the discrepancy. Most times this happens it’s due to deleting a transaction and only deleting one side of the transaction (debit but not credit and vice versa). It’s also possible that the date changed on one side of a transaction which made one month out of balance and the other month out of balance the opposite amount.
You should first add holding file to transactions (GL>Add Holding File to Transactions) so that all transactions will be sitting in GL transactions for the month where the out of balance occurred. Next you should go to GL Transactions and hit verify balance in the bottom left corner. If you get this message that the GL transactions balance is zero then you will need to export the GL transactions into Excel to find where the discrepancy is coming from.
Keep the search field blank (or use %) for GL transactions to pull all transactions not posted then hit export to put into Excel.
You can then do a filter and pivot table with the ‘rows’ field either being the reference or note and the ‘values’ field as the amount. You will then need to search for any entries that have a balance. Once you find the out of balance entry, you will then need to do a correction.
How to Do an Out of Balance Entry to Correct Previous Out of Balance
You will now need to either go to GL transactions and edit a transaction to correct the amount or do a further out of balance entry to correct if it was due to a posted transaction.
The below transaction does not have the debit matching the credit. Once you’ve identified which side needs to be corrected, you can just simply edit the transaction and change the amount.
If this transaction was instead posted out of balance, then you would not be able to correct it via GL transactions. You would instead have to correct via another out of balance entry. Please note that before doing the posting there is a warning that identifies if you will be out of balance.
In the example, we have found that the batch below was $59.22 too high for the debit so we will need to reduce GL 4005.2 by this amount.
Log into the month of the out of balance transaction then go to GL Transactions and add to correct. Please make sure that your adjusting entry has the same date as the out of balance transaction. It doesn’t ultimately matter what the debit side of this transaction is going to be as we are ultimately going to delete this as we just need to credit GL #4005.2 by $59.22.
Once you hit ok, it’ll split the transaction into the debit and credit entries. We then will need to delete the debit side so that only GL #4005.2 is affected.
Once this is done, go back to the GL-13 trial balance and run with the option to “include not posted transactions and holding file” turned on. You can then ensure that the total is $0 for the YTD column before going ahead and posting again to fully correct the out of balance.
Please note that if you are uncomfortable with doing this transaction on your own, our Support team would be happy to assist to show you how to do this.
You are related to multiple companies. Please select the company you wish to login as.