The Trial Balance report is a statement compiled at the end of a specified accounting period. It is a convenient method for checking that all the transactions and all the balances up to the date specified have been entered correctly in the ledger accounts.

The trial balance lists all of the debit and credit balances extracted from each of the accounts. The total of the debit and credit balances can then be compared and if the two totals agree, we can be reasonably confident that the book-keeping procedures have been carried out accurately.

Further information on what is a trial balance is available in the 'Entering Opening Balances' procedure.

A plain text data export file can be generated if required. See 'Exporting a trial balance' process

You can specify an As At Date for the transaction. The date can either be entered manually or selected from the pop-up calendar by clicking the  icon. The As At Date must be entered in the format DD/MM/YYYY, for example, 01/01/2000.

Clicking the "Last Year End" button is a short cut for populating the AS AT Date field with last year end date.

When entering dates manually, a date guessing routine speeds up the input by taking the user input and assuming the missing month and or year based on the current date as the user leaves the field i.e.

the date today is 30th October 2009

• User enters 15 or 15/ and tabs - field displays 15/10/2009
• User enters 15/9 or 15/9/ and tabs - field displays 15/9/2009

This will create the trial balance report with all the detail accounts for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and Stock aggregated in the top level accounts. This applies to both the report and the file download.

You can choose to generate a plain text file for export.

You can specify the value that will act as a separator between each individual field in the data export file.

Reports can be saved locally to your computer, or within the Liberty Accounts database.

If you are viewing a report in Adobe Acrobat you can save it by clicking on the file save icon within the Adobe Acrobat reader application.

If you are on the report parameters screen after generating a report you will see some extra options displayed as above. To save the report pdf file to your computer right-click on the "view report" link next to the Adobe  file icon and select the "Save target as" menu option.

If you want to save the report within the Liberty Accounts database simply give the report a meaningful name by editing the suggested report name then click the "Save" button. Reports saved within Liberty Accounts can be viewed at a later date via the menu option Reports | View Saved Reports.