Overview

What does out of balance mean?

A balance sheet is a statement (report) of all your asset and liability account (including equity) from the general ledger.

At the end of any period or month, the total value of all asset accounts must equal the total value of all liability accounts. This is shown on reports such as SA2168.

There can be a few reasons why your balance sheet doesn't balance. Two common reasons are:

• The opening balances of the system do not balance, because the prior year did not balance.
• One or more accounts are hidden from the balance sheet report.

Prior year is out of balance

You can check whether your opening balances are out of balance by running report SA2427 - General Ledger Balancing Summary and checking that the Opening balance column balances to $0.

Accounts are hidden from financial reports

Accounts can be hidden from financial reports by unticking the Display in the Financial reports checkbox from the Accounts form. If any of your accounts have this option unticked, then they won't display in your balance sheet report by default.

To include hidden accounts when running SA3535 - Balance Sheet (as at selected period), turn on the filter Show accounts even if they have been flagged as "Don't display in financial reports" and refresh the report. This allows you to check the results to confirm if your balance sheet is truly out of balance.

Did you find this article helpful?

If this article is missing information, ambiguous or didn’t give you clear instructions, let us know and we will make it better! Please email us and quote the KB# in the top left of this article to let us know why it didn’t help you out and we will point you in the direction of additional information.

Last edit: 01/09/2026