Trial Balance - Nominal

A trial balance reports all the nominal ledger accounts, with their current balances listed in the debit or credit column as appropriate, and so gives a complete picture of the current position of the nominal ledger.

You should print the trial balance at the end of each month, after the updates from the purchase and sales ledgers, to check that the control totals in the nominal ledger agree to the ledgers themselves. Also you should check that bank balances in the nominal can be reconciled to your bank statements — if you are using the Datafile Software cash book application, and then use the specific bank reconciliation procedure there.

You can arrange that your trial balance prints sub-totals on certain account code changes — after, for example, income and expenditure account ranges, fixed assets, current assets, current liabilities, long term liabilities and owners’ equity. These are specified in the nominal ledger System Profiles.

There may be exceptional circumstances where you wish to report on only part of the ledger. In this case you may select on a range of accounts, but the total of the debit balances may not then agree with the total of the credit balances for the range of accounts selected.

Note