Ability to show outstanding balances in Trial Balance Report

Written by Kevin Suh, NetSuite Administrator | Aug 15, 2024 4:50:00 PM

The Trial Balance is a report that displays the balance of each active account as of a specific date, typically the end of the month. The account balances are listed in both debit and credit columns. Accountants generate this report before creating financial statements to ensure that the debits and credits are balanced. Once the trial balance is in equilibrium, the financial statements can be prepared. To view the Trial Balance report, follow these steps: Navigate to Reports > Financial > Trial Balance.

A message will appear showing that your report is loading. You can track the progress of the report loading via the status bar at the bottom of the report. If needed, you can stop the report from loading by clicking Cancel Report next to the status bar. If you need access to masked employee information, please reach out to your account administrator. In the report, you can click on an account name to see more details about that account. Clicking on the dollar amount listed for an account will open an account detail report showing recent transactions. Refer to the Account Detail Report for more information. There may be discrepancies between the amounts in the Trial Balance and the account detail reports due to the following reasons:

For income statement accounts (Income, Expense, Other Income, Other Expense, and Cost of Goods Sold), the Trial Balance report only includes transactions posted from the beginning of the calendar year up to the As of date. The account detail reports for these accounts, however, also include balances from transactions posted before the start of the calendar year.
Retained earnings in the Trial Balance report are presented as the sum of cumulative net income and amounts posted directly to the retained earnings account via journal entries. The cumulative net income is a calculated value used for reporting and does not appear in the account register detail report.
The system do not zero out the opening balances of the income and expense accounts due to the automatic close feature in NetSuite. It is where nominal accounts are not zeroed out and posted to Retained Earnings because doing so would zero the past income statements and prevent them from being viewed.

This is currently a NetSuite Limitation and has been like this since it was released. Enhancement #197716 can be found and add a vote for its future implementation and be notified of future updates.

Here are the steps to show the outstanding balances in the Trial Balance Report:

Click Customize.
Under More Options > Click Show Zeros checkbox.
Click Preview.
Result: The missing account is now showing but with a 0.00 balance.
You can also click on 'View Detail Report' when you hover over the amount to see the source transaction records

Additionally, the table below lists the account types in the trial balance report and indicates whether they appear as a credit or debit:

Account Type	Debit	Credit
Bank	X
Accounts Receivable	X
Other Current Asset	X
Fixed Asset	X
Other Asset	X
Accounts Payable		X
Credit Card		X
Other Current Liability		X
Long Term Liability		X
Equity		X
Income		X
Cost of Goods Sold	X
Expense	X
Other Income		X
Other Expense	X
Deferred Revenue		X
Deferred Expense	X
Unbilled Receivable		X
Non-posting

If you want to learn more about the trial balance report, please contact Concentrus today to discuss your needs.

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