What it is
The trial balance is the accountant's worksheet: every account with its Saldo inicial (opening balance), its Debe (debits) and Haber (credits) for the period, and its Saldo final (closing balance). It comes from the same general ledger that feeds the financial statements and the XML trial balance for the SAT, Mexico's tax authority: if they said different things, one of them would be wrong.
Balances follow the account's normal balance: for a debit-balance account, debits minus credits; for a credit-balance account, credits minus debits. A negative balance means the account ended up against its normal side (for example, Proveedores, accounts payable, in negative) and is worth reviewing.
The Totales row adds up the period's debits and credits, and the indicator next to the filters says Cuadra (balanced) when they are equal. Since every póliza (journal entry) balances to the cent before it is saved, so does the trial balance.
When to use it
- Every month, before you close it.
- When a balance does not look right and you want to see where it came from.
- To review what you will deliver to the SAT before you download the XML.
Step by step
- Go to Containn → Balanza de comprobación (trial balance).
- Choose Año (year), Mes (month) and Periodo: Solo el mes (month only) or Del año a la fecha (year to date). The opening balance is everything before the first day of the period.
- Check the Cuadra indicator and look for balances you did not expect.
- Click any account: its account ledger opens for the same period.
For example, if in September the in-house guest account opens at 48,500.00 MXN, receives 612,300.00 MXN of charges and 598,750.00 MXN of collections, it closes at 62,050.00 MXN: what guests owed when the month ended.
What can go wrong
- You don't see an account. Only accounts with a balance or with activity appear, and only posting-level accounts, the ones that receive entries: the on-screen trial balance does not roll up into control accounts. The SAT version, in XML, does roll balances up into their control accounts.
- Income and expense accounts start January with a balance. That happens until you close the prior fiscal year: the year-end close brings them to zero and moves the profit to equity.
- You opened the other trial balance. Under Finances there is also a Trial balance: that one is for the business day, with the prior day's balance, the day's charges and payments and the closing balance of guest accounts. The accounting one is under Containn.
- A day is missing. Only signed days whose póliza was generated are included (why a póliza is not generated). A cancelled póliza does not count either.