TRIAL BALANCE (not to be confused with the Trial Balance Report) is a new feature added in November 2015 into QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) to allow accounting professionals and tax preparers to easily have an organized workflow for reviewing end-year financial statements; in a nutshell you get the following information for each account in your Chart of Accounts:
- Beginning Balance (i.e as of 12/31/2014)
- Unadjusted Balance (i.e as of 12/31/2015) which will contain all the transactions that are in QuickBooks Online with the exception of Adjusted Jornal Entries
- Adjustments (total amount of Adjusted Jornal Entries)
- Adjusted Balance: Unadjusted balance plus Adjustments
All in formal credit/debit formats. In addition you have the ability to add a checkmark next to each account to help keep track of which account balances have been reviewed/approved by accountant and even a place to add some notes plus attachments as working papers to each account balance.
Finally, Tax Mapping was also added to allow a tax preparer to tie every account to a tax line (for example: Sales are mapped to “1a Gross Receipts or Sales” in 1120 tax form). Once all mapping is completed, you may do a direct export into Intuit Tax Online with no additional data entry required to load trial balance into your corporate tax return; or alternatively, if you use a different tax software (like Lacerte, ProSeries, or CS Ultra Tax) you can just export the Excel/CSV file that can just be imported with minor effort into most major tax software packages.
I think Intuit is onto something big here, being this the first installment of TRIAL BALANCE, I expect tons of great additional features added after this 2016 tax season and all the feedback from the community comes in!
Here is my video review:
