A trial balance is a report listing every account in your chart of accounts with its total debit or credit balance as of a chosen date. Its whole job is to confirm total debits equal total credits across the entire company, a basic sanity check that your books aren't mathematically broken. Run it from Reports, search Trial Balance, and pick a date. You don't file it or send it anywhere; it's a diagnostic step, usually on the way to closing the books or handing things to an accountant.
1. Open Reports. Go to Reports in the left navigation and search for Trial Balance in the search bar.
2. Set the date. Pick a single date or a range. Most people run it as of month-end, quarter-end, or year-end, right before closing that period.
3. Review the two columns. Every account on your chart of accounts shows up with either a debit or a credit balance, never both. At the bottom, the debit column total and the credit column total should match exactly.
4. Drill into anything that looks wrong. Click any number to see the individual transactions behind it, which is the usual next step if a balance looks off for an account that shouldn't carry one, or if the totals don't tie out at all.
5. Export or print if you need to hand it off. Use the Export button to send it to Excel or PDF, typically for an accountant who wants to review the full account list before close.
In QuickBooks Online specifically, the trial balance almost never goes out of balance on its own, because QuickBooks enforces double-entry behind the scenes; every transaction you enter already debits and credits something automatically. The report mostly exists as a holdover from manual bookkeeping and Desktop-era habits, where a bad journal entry or a data file problem really could throw things off.
Where it still earns its keep is right before closing a period or handing data to an accountant: it's a fast way to confirm nothing's structurally wrong before anyone spends real time on the detailed reports. If a business runs it every month purely as a ritual, that's a sign the process could just as easily run itself and flag the rare exception instead of someone opening the report out of habit.
Instead of someone manually opening the Trial Balance (and a handful of other reports) before every month-end close, the checks run automatically and only surface a result when something actually needs a human to look.
The reports an outside accountant wants before close, trial balance included, get exported and delivered on a schedule, so nobody's chasing down a request by email every quarter.
Tell us which reports you run out of habit versus which ones actually catch problems, and we'll tell you if the routine part can run on its own.
Tell us what your close actually involves, which reports, who reviews them, how often, and we'll tell you honestly how much of it is still a judgment call versus a checklist someone's working through by memory. Trial balances and close checklists are one example; we look at anything repetitive in the business, not just this one report.
Let's talk →Run the report as described above, then use the Print icon (or Export > Export to PDF for a cleaner printable copy) from the report screen itself. There's no separate print-specific version of the report.
You don't build one from scratch; it's a standard report that pulls from your existing chart of accounts and transactions automatically. Searching for it under Reports and setting a date is the entire process.
No. A trial balance lists every account with a raw debit or credit total, income and expense accounts included, and exists to check that debits equal credits. A balance sheet only shows assets, liabilities, and equity as of a date, formatted as a financial statement you'd actually hand to a lender or investor.
In QBO this is rare since the system enforces balanced entries on every transaction. When it does happen, it's usually tied to a data issue, a corrupted file (more common in Desktop) or a sync problem with a connected app, and it's worth checking the Audit Log for anything that looks like a bypassed entry before assuming the report itself is wrong.