Balancing Accounts
What does balancing accounts mean?
To balance an account means to find the account’s balance—or the difference between debit entries and credit entries.
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How it Works
In the days of manual accounting systems, it was necessary to prepare a month-end trial balance.
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The trial balance was a list of the balance of each and every account in the general ledger.
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First, you had to find the balance of each account.
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Some accounts have entries on one side of the account, only.
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In this case, the account’s balance is the total of those entries.
![ba6](https://seeaccountingnow.online/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ba6.jpg)
Other accounts have entries on both sides of the account.
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In this case, you had to find the difference between the two sides.
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To do this, you find the total of the largest side and show this on both sides.
![ba9](https://seeaccountingnow.online/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ba9.jpg)
Next, you find the difference between the two sides and show this as balance carried down.
![ba10](https://seeaccountingnow.online/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ba10.jpg)
Finally, you bring this balance down on the largest side.
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This is the balance you record in the trial balance
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© R.J. Hickman 2020