Chapter 16
Checking Your Accuracy — By Trial and Hopefully No Error
In This Chapter
Putting your balances on trial
Finding and correcting errors
Preparing a worksheet
Generating reports from your computerized system
After you close out all your journals and do your darndest to catch any and all errors (flip to Chapter 15 for instructions on how to do this), the time comes to test your work. If you’ve entered all double-entry transactions in the books correctly, the books balance out, and your trial’s a success!
Unfortunately, few bookkeepers get their books to balance on the first try. And in some cases, the books balance, but errors still exist. This chapter explains how you do a trial balance of your books and gives tips on finding any errors that may be lurking. You also find out how to take your first step to developing financial reports, which I explain in Part V, by creating a worksheet.
Working with a Trial Balance
When you first start entering transactions in a dual-entry accounting system, you may think, “This is a lot of work, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to use ...
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