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This makes sure that your beginning balances for the next accounting cycle are accurate. Preparing a post-closing trial balance is an important step in the accounting cycle. Completed after closing entries, the post-closing trial balance prepares your accounts for the next period. The key difference between a trial balance and a balance sheet is one of scope. A balance sheet records not only the closing balances of accounts within a company but also the assets, liabilities, and equity of the company.

How to Find Net Income From Unadjusted Trial Balance

Both the https://www.bookstime.com/s and credit totals are calculated at the end, and if these are not equal, one can know there must have been some mistake in preparing the trial balance. The trial balance worksheet contains columns for both income statement and balance sheet entries, allowing you to easily combine multiple entries into a single amount.

On the statement of retained earnings, we reported the ending balance of retained earnings to be $15,190. We need to do the closing entries to make them match and zero out the temporary accounts.

Requirements for a Trial Balance

The next one is called the Post Closing Trial Balance and is a list of all the company accounts and their balances after any adjustments have been made. So if there are already two other trial balance reports, why would you possibly need another one?

Preparing the post-closing trial balance will follow the same process that took to create the unadjusted or adjusted trial balance. Each account balance is transferred from their ledger accounts to the post-closing trial balance.