Stay Balanced: Causes Of Out-of-Balance Balance Sheets

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It’s that time of year again! 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:
  1. Run your report with a fresh default template. If the Balance Sheet now balances, the non-default template being used is our culprit. This indicates there are likely missing or duplicate accounts in the template.
  2. Validate your chart template.  When we validate our template, we get a report that will tell us if we have any missing or duplicate accounts. 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 remove the duplicates. We strongly advise you to include all accounts so their prior activity will be considered into totals.
  3. Include inactive accounts. From the General tab of the report parameter, 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.
  4. Review the defined filters. If your report currently has many filters in use, let’s set them back to their defaults. If the Balance Sheet then balances, this points to one or more of our filters as being the cause of out of balance.  Set all but the Not Yet Posted filter to “All”. Set the Not Yet Posted filter to “None.” This will avoid incomplete journal entries being pulled in.
  5. Review fund set up. Navigate to Configuration within General Ledger. Once you click Funds, you will want open each fund record to check that there is a valid net asset account listed on the bottom of the window and that there are the appropriate interfund accounts defined. If any changes must be made, Save and Close the record.
  6. Create a new Balance Sheet. If a new report with the same parameters balances, this tells us the report parameter became disconnected on the back end.
These are just a few of the most common causes of Balance Sheets that do not balance. Here are some other helpful resources to help correct an out-of-balance Balance Sheet:

How to Troubleshoot Report Totaling Problems and Missing Accounts
How to Validate a VCO Chart Template
News ARCHIVED | Financial Edge® Tips and Tricks 05/21/2015 7:00am EDT
Added by Darcey ONeill
  

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