The Ledger Lowdown: Get it in Balance
Hey blog readers! Nothing is more frustrating when you run your Balance Sheet and the bottom line is out-of-balance 
. So here you are with an out of balance Balance Sheet that you need to have to your board in an hour, or, even worse, an hour ago. What should you do? Well, the first thing is don't, or try not to, panic. A deep breath usually works for me. Then take a look at these common causes of out of balance financial statements and reports; you may be able to resolve the issue and be a hero.
Create and preview a new Trial Balance Report for the same period and fund(s) as the out of balance financial statement. The report should always be in balance when including all accounts and their balances. If the Trial balance report is incorrect with no filters or VCO selected,
create a case.
If the Trial Balance is correct, try the following:
- Run the report as Supervisor or as a user without account level security defined. Financial statements will exclude accounts that a user does not have rights to view.
- Mark the option on the General tab to include inactive accounts and rerun the report. Inactive accounts with activity will cause the report to be out of balance.
- If the report totals correctly, create a query of inactive accounts (BB89504) and change the account(s) from Inactive to Active (BB68498).
- Check your VCO template. As new accounts are added or new templates created, accounts can be left off or duplicated causing the report to be out of balance or total incorrectly.
- Run a chart template validation (BB62966).
- Make any appropriate adjustments for duplicate or missing accounts (BB64859).
- If the chart validation does not pinpoint the problem, run the report using the default template (BB67838).
- Check the filters on the report to ensure you're not filtering out accounts or activity. A combination of advanced filters on a VCO and report filters can cause you to filter your way out of balance. Remove all filters from the report to determine if the filters are the cause.
- Run the report at a level 9. Running reports at a lower level will summarize activity. Increasing the level is an easy way to ensure no accounts are excluded from the report.
- Recreate the report to ensure the parameter file is not corrupt.
If your report is still out of balance after following these steps, create a case. Support will be more than happy to help you.
Talk to you soon!