Every accountant's challenge is to 'keep the books balanced'. This brings us to the topic of double entry accounting. This is by far the most difficult concept to grasp for most non-accounting people.
Every transaction in your business (selling a tire, buying a rebuilt alternator, paying your taxes etc) can be assigned to TWO (or more) of the accounts in your chart of accounts.
For instance, when you sell a tire, it will obviously increase the applicable Sales GL Account. However, it will also increase what your customer owes you.
When you buy that rebuilt alternator, your are increasing the payable account to that supplier, but you are also increasing the value of your inventory. When you pay your taxes, you are decreasing your tax owing Account, but you are also decreasing your bank balance.
Each Account in the Chart of Accounts has a Debit (left) side and a Credit (right) side. The software knows that every transaction in your business affects at least two accounts. It also knows whether the transaction will affect the left or right side of that Account. The software automatically writes each of your business's financial transactions to the proper Accounts.
At any time you may add up all the numbers in all the right sides and all the numbers in the left sides of all the accounts and their totals should be EQUAL. This means that your books are balanced. The software will never let the books become unbalanced.
A Trial Balance is the exercise of printing out all the left side and right side totals for each account in the Chart of Accounts and adding them up to prove they are balanced. You may print a Trial Balance in the software any time you need one.
Caution:
The software allows you to print your trial balance for any period of
time. As a result, it may not agree with other financial statements of
the same time period. The software's balance sheet brings balances forward
from previous periods while the trial balance does not. If you wish for
them to balance, set the start date in the trial balance to your opening
date on the Software's accounting system.