Other Definitions
trial balance (dict)
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Trial BalanceIn bookkeeping, the trial balance is a worksheet wherein all the balances of each ledger are entered in two columns, namely debit and credit. Trial balance is prepared in each financial period as a summary of the closing of the previous ledger. The total of the debit side should always be equal to the total of the credit side which proves the arithmetic accuracy of the ledger entry. So the trial balance is also a tool to detect any errors which may have occurred during the double-entry system of the ledger. However, a balanced trial balance does not necessarily guarantee that there is no error. For example, a transaction could have been removed from the ledger account, a journal entry might have been posted in the wrong ledger, or debit and credit entries could have been transposed. Such mistakes might not be shown in the trial balance.
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