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It’s possible for your general ledger to become out-of-balance because of system crashes during posting.

This happens when one side of a transaction (either a debit or credit) is posted, but the system crashes before the other side is finished. The problem can happen at any time, and it is difficult to prevent (since it is always system related). For performance reasons, Clients & Profits doesn’t automatically warn you when you’re out of balance. But it’s easy to see if your G/L is out of balance: simply look at the bottom line of the Balance Sheet (it’ll show the out of balance amount), or at Total Assets, Liabilities, and Equity section on the Trial Balance (which should always be zero).

The key to solving an out-of-balance G/L problem is to find the missing (or duplicated) journal entries. Since all JEs for a particular transaction have the same reference number, it’s easy to track down the bad entries. To make troubleshooting your G/L easy, Clients & Profits X provides a special Out of Balance Checker utility.

How The Out of Balance Checker Works

The Out of Balance Checker utility works by analyzing your G/L journal entries transaction-by-transaction. It adds up the total of each transaction’s debits and credits (i.e., JEs with the same reference number), then highlights the ones that don’t balance. The Out of Balance report only shows the transactions that need fixing.

The Out of Balance Checker only finds unbalanced entries that need to be corrected. It does not change your general ledger in any way. You’ll need to make your own judgments about how to correct an unbalanced entry (that is, making the appropriate debit or credit adjusting entry).

The total debits and credits for each reference on the Out of Balance checker report correspond to the total debits and credits in the G/L window for that transaction.

The total amount of the entries on the report should equal the out-of-balance amount on the Balance Sheet or Trial Balance.

For more information, see the Out of Balance Checker FAQ.

To run the Out of Balance Checker

1 Choose Accounting > General Ledger.

2 Choose Edit > G/L Tools > Auditor

Check totals for any period. The Out of Balance Checker can check G/L account totals for the entire fiscal year or for a single period. If you know which period is out of balance, checking only that period is much faster than check the entire year.

3 Select the Out of Balance Checker, then click OK.



The journal entries are analyzed, then the Out of Balance JEs report appears. All out of balance entries are listed and the reference numbers given for easy auditing.

You will need to research to see why the entry is out of balance by checking the reference number in the G/L and also finding the source document. The problem is generally in the posting and an adjusting JE needs to be added to correct the entry.