Trial balance and general ledger
The check that everything adds up, and the movement-by-movement detail of every account.
These are the two reports you use to audit your own business: one tells you whether the whole thing adds up, the other lets you follow the trail of a specific peso. Both are available from the Gold plan.
The trial balance
What it's for
The trial balance is the snapshot of all your accounts in a period, with what came in (debits), what went out (credits) and each one's closing balance. At the bottom there's one line that says it all:
Total debits = Total credits. If those two numbers match, your books are balanced.
It is the check an accountant runs before closing the month. Here you have it in one click, at any time.
When I use it
- Before closing a period: it is the natural step before the close.
- When the summary shows a number you didn't expect and you want to see which account it comes from.
- When you want to know, without opening a hundred loans, how much you earned in interest and how much in arrears.
How to read it
Code | Account | Debits | Credits | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1101 | Cash | RD$52,300 | RD$40,000 | RD$12,300 |
1200 | Loan Portfolio | RD$40,000 | RD$21,500 | RD$18,500 |
3101 | Lender's Capital | RD$25,000 | RD$25,000 | |
4101 | Interest Income | RD$4,500 | RD$4,500 | |
4102 | Arrears Income | RD$1,300 | RD$1,300 | |
Totals |
| RD$92,300 | RD$92,300 | ✅ Balanced |
Balances are always shown in natural magnitude: an income account with a credit balance appears positive, not negative. You don't have to interpret signs.
Below that, balances are added up by side: Total debit balances (accounts such as Cash and Portfolio) and Total credit balances (Capital and income). In balanced books they match; in the example, RD$30,800 on each side. The opening column carries its own debit and credit totals too.
Which accounts appear
Every active account appears, plus any account that had movement in the period even if you deactivated it afterwards. So an account you used mid-month doesn't vanish from the report, while one you deactivated a year ago and never moved doesn't clutter it.
Filtering by collector
If you work with collection agents, you can filter the trial balance by a collector's till or by the "Owner / Office" bucket (what you collected or spent yourself). Every collection and every expense an agent records is tagged with their till automatically; the owner's go to "Owner / Office".
This filter goes by the till of whoever recorded the payment, not by the Collected by that the collection reports use. Collectors without access have no till: what you record on their behalf shows up under "Owner / Office". See Assigning collectors and crediting collections.
With a collector filter active, the totals do not have to match each other: you are looking at a slice of the ledger, not the whole ledger. That is normal and expected: for the balance check, remove the filter.
The general ledger
What it's for
If the trial balance tells you how much, the general ledger tells you why. It is the list of every movement, one by one, with its date, its entry and its description.
When I use it
- "Where did these RD$3,000 in Tuesday's cash come from?" Filter by 1101 and you'll see.
- To rebuild the full history of an account in the face of a doubt or a dispute.
- To review everything a collector moved, filtering by their till.
How to use it
- Go to Accounting → Reports.
- In the trial balance, click the row of the account you want to review (for example, 1101): the general ledger of that account opens.
- If you had a collector filter active on the trial balance, the general ledger inherits it.
- The list loads in pages: press Load more to see the next ones, so it doesn't load thousands of lines at once.
The general ledger always covers one account and adds two very useful columns: the period's opening balance and the running balance line by line.
Edge cases
- A period with no activity? The report comes back empty, with zeros. That's not an error.
- Never closed a period? With no period specified, both reports use the open period containing today's date; if none is open, they use any period containing today even if it is already closed, and if there is none, the most recent period. They only come back empty if your business has no periods at all.
- The trial balance says it does NOT balance? This shouldn't be possible: the engine rejects any unbalanced entry before saving it. If you see it, it's a sign of a serious problem: contact support and do not close the period.
Plan and permissions
- Gold or Premium plan (Accounting reports module). On Basic these reports are not available.
- Permission
accounting:read. The owner always has it.