Trial Balance – Not Providing Expected Figures

This article hopes to explain, and provide guidance as to amend, the causes of a Trial Balance not producing the figures you expect.

How the KashFlow Trial Balance Works

The Trial Balance allows you to specify a Start Date, and an End Date, as to define a period to report for. This will return the value of all Transactions for all Nominal Codes, for the defined period, irrespective of if the Nominal Code is a Profit & Loss, or Balance Sheet item.

To further expand on this point, this means no Opening Balances are brought forward, and the values of any Nominal Code will be the sum of all items allocated to it with a date that falls on, or in between, the Start Date and End Date you specify when running the report.

With the above in mind, most users will want to specify a Start Date that falls before their earliest recorded item, or simply specifying a date such as 01/01/2000.

Transactions Recorded With Invalid Dates

This issue is usually visible when a Balance Sheet does not match a Trial Balance for the complete length of your records.

If using the CSV Import Tool, or the SOAP API, a user may be able to supply a Date value for Transactions/ Payments that does not match the expected standard but is still accepted by KashFlow.

Although rare, this causes the Date of the item to always be beyond the scope of the Date Range you run the Trial Balance for thus not included in any of the figures.

The following method explains the best method of finding these Transactions/ Payments in New KashFlow:

1. Click on the “Edit Details” (pencil icon) of each Bank Account, and note their respective ID. The ID is located in the URL for the Bank Account, in the location specified by the [BANK_ID] placeholder in the following URL:
   https://app.kashflow.com/#bankaccounts/[BANK_ID]

   As an example, the Bank Account ID has been KashFlow coloured https://app.kashflow.com/#bankaccounts/012345

2. For each of your Bank Accounts, replace the [BANK_ID] in the following URLs with their respective ID:
   https://app.kashflow.com/#bankaccounts/[BANK_ID]/transactions?startDate=00010101&endDate=19000101

   As an example of what this may look like, the Bank Account ID has been KashFlow coloured https://app.kashflow.com/#bankaccounts/012345/transactions?startDate=00010101&endDate=19000101

3. For each Bank Account link, copy and paste it in the Address Bar of your browser as to navigate to it. If you are presented with any Transactions, click on each respectively to edit the Date to something more reasonable to your records.

   If the Transaction is a Payment, the link will take you to the Invoice/ Purchase to which it pays. You will then need to click “Edit” of the respective Payment and edit the date there. If this was not the only item listed in the Bank Account, after editing it, simply return to the Bank Account using your defined link and edit the others.

Due to the technology behind the Classic KashFlow application, it may not be possible to define a complete Date Range as to capture all the erroneously dated items, as such, you may simply want to navigate to this Audit Trail.

For all items supplied, you will want to take the “Tx No.” and append it to the end of this URL https://securedwebapp.com/report-audit-history.asp?tx=

Using a Tx No of 42 as an example, this may would like this
https://securedwebapp.com/report-audit-history.asp?tx=42

Use the adjusted links to be taken to the respective Audit Trail for the specific Transaction, which will present you with an option to “View Transaction” as to drill down to the edit screen within which you can amend the date to something more reasonable to your records.

Erroneous Assignment

This issue is usually visible when the Credit and Debit columns of the Trial Balance do not match, though due to the number of potential issues, we have separated the guidance on this matter to a different article, as is listed below:
Trial Balance – Not Balancing

Please note, we understand if you are unable to, or are having difficulty in attempting to find these imbalances within your accounts. If you think it would be a quicker process for you, please feel free to send in a ticket to the KashFlow Support Team requesting assistance in the matter. Though please note, depending on the size of your data it can take a significant time longer than standard queries to find the exact cause of your imbalances.