The main purpose of the creation of a trial balance is to check whether all of the debits are equal to all of the credits witin the real accounts. Expense accounts also represent temporary income statement accounts. These accounts accumulate the expenses incurred during the period and start fresh each period. This allows the company to consider only the expenses used during the current period. As the accountant prepares the income statement, she uses the expense balances from the accounting records. Since the expenses start fresh each period, the accountant only needs to find the balance. Do recall in Module 2 when you first looked at the Statement of Retained Earnings that withdrawals and dividends are taken out of the retained earnings account.

DebitsDebit represents either an increase in a company’s expenses or a decline in its revenue. The year-end closing is the process of closing the books for the year.

List of Accounts

The preparation of the post-closing trial balance is the last step in the accounting cycle. The post-closing trial balance presents the lists of all the accounts whose closing entries are passed and posted in their respective ledger accounts. It is the third trial balance prepared in the accounting cycle to verify the totals of debits and credits. Similar to the normal trial balance, the totals of debits and credits should be equal in the post-closing trial balance. As all the nominal accounts are closed by the closing entries passed in the accounting cycle, the post-closing trial balance consists of all the permanent accounts of the balance sheet. The adjusted trial balance shows the final or closing balances of all general accounts in the ledger after adjustments have been made.

It’s important that your trial balance and all debit balances and all credit balances in your general ledger are the same. If they’re not, you’ll have to do some research to locate the errors. While all of the adjusting entries for ABC Business are reflected in the adjusted trial balance, we still need to do some closing entries before running the post-closing trial balance. A post-closing trial balance is a report that is run to verify that all temporary accounts have been closed and their beginning balance reset to zero. The balances of the nominal accounts have been absorbed by the capital account – Mr. Gray, Capital. Hence, you will not see any nominal account in the post-closing trial balance.

What Are the Primary Components of a Trial Balance Sheet?

The income statement accounts would not be listed because they are temporary accounts whose balances have been closed to the owner’s capital account. As you can see, the accounts are generally listed in balance sheet order starting with the assets followed by the liabilities and then equity accounts. If these two don’t equal, post closing trial balance definition there is either a problem with closing entries or theadjusted trial balance. In addition to error detection, the trial balance is prepared to make the necessary adjusting entries to the general ledger. It is prepared again after the adjusting entries are posted to ensure that the total debits and credits are still balanced.

• The post-closing trial balance can only be prepared after each closing entry has been posted to the General Ledger.
• Debit Income summary account and credit dividends account by $2,794.
• Before that, it had a credit balance of 9,850 as seen in the adjusted trial balance above.
• Before understanding those types, it is crucial to know what the trial balance is.