Trial balance
The trial balance is the report that proves your books tie out — every account, every debit, every credit, for a period you choose. It is the one an accountant asks for first, and the one that turns “the numbers look right” into something you can hand over and defend.
Where the balance sheet and profit & loss summarize, the trial balance enumerates. One row per account, no rollups, nothing netted away.
What it answers
A trial balance answers a narrow, important question: does the sum of all debits equal the sum of all credits? If it does, the ledger is internally consistent. If it does not, the books are broken and every other report is suspect.
In Ledfra it should always balance: every transaction is checked when it is written, and an unbalanced set of entries is rejected rather than absorbed. The report shows that check explicitly, with a banner if the totals ever disagree.
That banner is not decoration. Reports read a continuously refreshed rollup of your entries rather than re-summing the entire ledger on every request, and the trial balance is the report that would catch it if that rollup ever fell out of step with the underlying double-entry. A correctness guarantee you cannot see is one you cannot audit — so Ledfra shows you the check rather than asking you to assume it.
The four columns
Every account gets one row and four money columns, grouped under its root category:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Opening | The account balance the instant before the period started |
| Debits | Total debit movement during the period |
| Credits | Total credit movement during the period |
| Closing | The balance at the end of the period |
Opening and closing are balances, shown on the account's natural side. Debits and credits are movement, and they are never netted against each other.
That last point is the whole reason this report exists separately from a balance rollforward. An escrow account that took in $50,000 and paid out $50,000 during the month has a closing balance of zero — and a rollforward would show you a row of zeros, as if nothing happened. The trial balance shows $50,000 of debits and $50,000 of credits, which is the truth: half a million dollars of activity passed through an account that ended flat. For a platform holding other people's money, that volume is often the most important number on the page.
Reading the report
- Date range — half-open, so the start is included and the end is not. It is the same control the P&L uses, so the two reports always describe the same period.
- Show unused accounts — off by default. Accounts with no activity and no balance are hidden, because a real chart of accounts has plenty of them and they bury the rows that matter.
- Totals row — the sums that must match, with the balanced check beside them.
- CSV export — the report downloads as a spreadsheet, which is how it usually gets handed to whoever asked for it.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Most teams that outgrow a balances column discover the problem the same way: two systems disagree, and nobody can say which one is right. There is no report that settles it, because no report was ever the source of truth.
A trial balance settles it. Every figure on it traces to immutable entries that were checked when they were written, and nothing has been edited since — corrections in Ledfra are posted as reversals, so the history stays intact. That is what makes the books auditable rather than merely plausible.
Limitations
- Figures come from a continuously refreshed rollup of your entries, not a re-sum of the whole ledger on every request. A posting appears within about a minute rather than instantly.
- App only, with CSV export. There is no trial balance endpoint in the public API today. If you need the data programmatically, the account and transaction endpoints are the current route.
- It proves arithmetic, not structure. A ledger with revenue filed in the wrong place balances perfectly and still reports the wrong revenue. See Chart of accounts design.
- No adjusting entries workflow. Ledfra does not automate period-end adjustments, accruals, or closing entries — it never closes the books.
- One ledger, one currency, no consolidation across entities.
Where to go next
- Balance sheet — the same entries, summarized as position.
- Profit & loss — the same entries, summarized as performance.
- Transactions — how the entries behind every row get written, including reversals.
- What is Ledfra? — why balancing is enforced rather than checked afterwards.