Don’t Let An Unbalanced Balance Sheet Get You Down
It’s that time of year again, when we’re getting ready to close the books on our fiscal year and the Balance Sheet becomes even more important than it already is. Everybody expects their balance sheet to balance, so it can be quite stressful when setting up your balance sheet only to find out it is out of balance. While this can definitely cause some worry, the good news is, there are some simple things to check to get the balance sheet back to being in balance.
The first step to check is to validate the Visual Chart Organizer template or VCO, being used on the report. When we validate the VCO, we’ll get a report that will tell us if we have any missing or duplicate accounts on the VCO. If we have any missing accounts, we need to add them to the template. If we have any duplicate accounts then we should edit the template to take out the duplicates. Another good way to test the VCO, is to create a new default template, then run the balance sheet with the new template to see if it balances.
Next, do you have any inactive accounts in your database? Another step to test if we can bring the balance sheet into balance is to make sure we are including inactive accounts. Once on the General Tab of the balance sheet, mark the box for Include inactive accounts. If any of the accounts have a balance,
even if inactive, we will want to make sure we have their balances added to the report.
Next, let’s check the filters on the Filters Tab of the Balance Sheet. If the balance sheet currently has many filters in use, let’s set them back to their defaults. Almost all the filters should be set to ALL, with the exception of Not Yet Posted transactions. This particular filter should be set to none. We only want to look for Posted information on the balance sheet, and having the Not Yet Posted filter set to ALL will try to show all activity created in the sub ledgers and open journal entry batches.
Have there been any funds added recently to the database? To check these, we will want to be in General Ledger, click on Configuration, and select the link for Funds. Once we’re in the funds, we will want to double click all the fund records to open each of them. On the Transaction Requirements
Tab, we’ll want to look at the bottom of the record and make sure we have defined what the Net Asset Account is for this fund. Next, click on the tab for interfund Accounts. We will want to make sure we’ve defined the appropriate account(s) here as well. Then click save and close. Do this for all the funds listed in this Funds section.
We can always create a new balance sheet to compare its numbers to the one that is out of balance. We can see if the new one balances. To do this, in General Ledger, click on Reports, click Financial Reports, then highlight balance sheet and click the open button to open a fresh report parameter.
These are just a few of the most common causes of Balance Sheets that do not balance. Here are some other helpful solutions to help fix an out of balance, balance sheet:
How to Troubleshoot Report Totaling Problems and Missing Accounts
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