Steps or How To Balance A Trial Balance (Part 5)

In the event that your trial balance doesn’t balance, go through the following bookkeeping tips/steps in the suggested order to ensure that the error can be detected soonest possible:

1. Find out the exact amount of your error: by how much are you out of balance?
2. Is the error $10,$100 or $1,000? You probably failed to carry when adding or to borrow when subtracting or you may have made a slide error in posting.
3. Look at your debits and credits. Is there an entry exactly equal to your discrepancy?
4. Does the amount of error divide evenly by 2? Look for a duplicate debit or a duplicate credit posting where there should be one of each. A debit may have been posted as a credit or vice versa
5. Does your out-of-balance number divide evenly by 9? Look for a transposition error. At this point, most errors have been located.
6. Add the trial balance columns again to check for accuracy. Next, recheck the addition while looking for a misread number. Sometimes a 1 is taken for a 7 or a carelessly written 3 or 5 may have fooled you.
7. Compare listing on the trial balance with each ledger account balance to ensure that you have not omitted any account balance in your trial balance.
8. Recalculate each ledger account balance.
9. Trace each ledger posting back to its place in the journal.Check off each number in the ledger and in the journal as you verify it. Then look for numbers with no check mark.
10. Verify that journal debits equal the journal credits