Trial Balance

A listing of every ledger account's balance, used to check that debits equal credits.

A trial balance is drawn up before financial statements are prepared, confirming the books are arithmetically consistent. It catches one-sided entries and addition errors, but it cannot detect a transaction recorded in the wrong account, omitted entirely, or duplicated — those keep both columns equal while leaving the accounts wrong.

The trial balance matched to the penny, which still did not prove every entry had landed in the right account.