Reading the trial balance

The trial balance is the one-page summary of your books. It lists every account with its total debits, total credits, and net balance, plus two checks: that the grand totals match, and that everything you have recorded actually reached the ledger.

Pick the period first

At the top of the page, Period chooses what the trial balance covers.

• All time totals everything since you started. Useful for a quick look, but it is not a report an accountant can file against, because it mixes every year together.
• A year gives you that year's books: income and expenses for that year only, and balances as at 31 December of that year. This is what "the trial balance as at 31 December" means, and it is the version that should agree with your T776 for the same year.

The Account picker beside it narrows the transactions list to a single account. It deliberately does not narrow the trial balance, because a trial balance of one account can never be shown to balance.

Both choices are kept in the address bar, so you can send your accountant a link to a specific year.

Which date is used

Every amount is placed by the date it belongs to, not the day it was typed in. Rent belongs to its due date, an expense to the date on the receipt, a payment to the day it was paid. So a December invoice you enter in January still appears in December, which is what makes a year-end trial balance trustworthy.

Retained earnings

When you pick a year, everything you earned or lost in earlier years appears on one line called Retained earnings (prior periods). That keeps earlier years off this year's income and expense lines, so nothing is counted twice, and it is why the report still balances.

There is nothing to run and nothing to close. Wealthru works retained earnings out each time you read the report, so it is always right, and re-opening a closed period cannot leave a stale figure behind.

How to read it

Each row is one account from the chart of accounts (Cash, Rent receivable, Rental income, each expense account, and so on). For each account you see:

• Debits and Credits totalled across every entry on that account.
• Balance = debits minus credits. A positive number is a debit balance (assets and expenses sit here), a negative number is a credit balance (income and what you owe).

At the bottom, the total debits and total credits are shown side by side. When they are equal, the books balance.

The two checks behind the indicator

The indicator at the top of the trial balance answers two separate questions, and it only shows Books balance ✓ when both are yes.

1. Do the books add up? Every entry records both sides at once, so this is almost always yes. On its own it does not tell you much, because it stays true even when entries are missing.
2. Is everything in there? Your rent charges, payments, refunds, expenses, security deposits, holding deposits, owner distributions, capital purchases and property sales are each matched against the ledger account they have to move. This is the check that can actually tell you something is wrong.

If the second check finds something, the indicator says "Books balance, but N entries have not been posted to the ledger" and a note below it shows the amount involved and which kinds of record are affected. Nothing has been lost: the records are all still there, they simply have not been written into the ledger yet. Contact support to rebuild the ledger from your records. The rebuild is safe to run more than once and never changes your records.

A few kinds of record are not covered by the second check yet. They are listed on the report itself with the reason, so a clean result never claims more than it checked.

What the accounts mean

• Cash is the money that has actually arrived.
• Rent receivable is what tenants owe but have not paid yet. It ties exactly to the outstanding balance you see on leases. An overpaid lease can show as a credit (negative) here.
• Rental income is the rent you have charged.
• The expense accounts total what you have spent by category, matching your T776 lines.

If the books do not balance

In normal use they always balance, because every entry records both sides at once. If the indicator ever shows the books do not balance, do not try to fix figures by hand. Run the integrity check from the General ledger page and contact support. The integrity check covers both halves: that nothing has been tampered with, and that your records are all in the ledger. A corrected figure is always recorded as a reversing entry, never an edit, so nothing is ever lost.

Hand it to your accountant

Use Export for your accountant (in your data export) to download the trial balance, the full general-ledger listing with running balances, the change history, and gl-tie-out.csv (the same completeness check the page runs, so your accountant can see what is covered) as CSV files. See "Export for your accountant".

The export also contains one dated trial balance per year, named trial-balance-2025.csv and so on, each stating the period it covers. That is the file to hand over alongside a year's T776.