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Balance Discrepancy Review

How to audit an account with a mismatched balance.

Written by Zuzana Sýkorová

This article explains how to track down a discrepancy if an account balance does not match.

Specifically, we will focus on account 311.001, which shows differing balances in 2020.

  1. Check the previous accounting period - Open the year 2019 and verify whether account 311.001 matches the outstanding invoices as of 31 December 2019. If the balances match, the issue lies in 2020; if they do not match, follow the steps below.
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  2. Check whether opening balances agree with account balances - We have found a discrepancy on account 311.001 and are proceeding with the next steps:
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  3. Trial balance - Go to Accounting – Accounting outputs – Trial balance, select this option, and configure the trial balance as follows:

    In the last step, select the print preview and review the balance:

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  4. Payment status as of date - Compare the trial balance with outstanding issued invoices as of 31 December 2020. Go to Sales – Issued invoices – Services – Calculate payment status as of date:

    After the calculation, select the print preview:

    And check the value on the last page:

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  5. Balance check - The next step is to check the balance: Go to Accounting – Accounting outputs – Balance – fill in the fields as shown in the screenshot:


    Check the value on the last page:

    The balance value matches the trial balance, but does not match the payment status of the issued invoices. The next step will be to check the bank.
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  6. Bank check - Go to the Money – Bank module and apply the following filter:

    Select – Contra account – 311.001. After filtering, verify that all transactions have the Matched and Posted checkboxes selected (additional filtering can also be applied). Correct any unmatched or unposted transactions that fall under account 311.001. If account 311.001 still does not balance, proceed to the next step.
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  7. Payment date of issued invoices - Another factor that may cause a discrepancy in account 311.001 is an early payment of an invoice (where the bank payment was created before the invoice itself). You can check this in Sales – Issued invoices 2021 – apply the following filter:


    If any invoices appear, they were likely paid early and may be contributing to the discrepancy.
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  8. Other liabilities - The automatic creation of overpayments may result in unsettled overpayments in other liabilities, which also affect the balance of account 311.001. Use filtering again to verify whether any unsettled transactions are pending here:

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  9. Matching symbol check - If the account balance in the trial balance comes out to zero but documents are still shown as outstanding in the balance report, the issue is not a data discrepancy but a difference in matching symbols. Generate the balance report without restricting by payment status, display the Variable symbol and Matching symbol columns side by side, and compare the documents for the same business transaction. If the matching symbols differ, this is typically caused by a single payment that settled multiple documents with different variable symbols. The correction procedure is described in the article Matching symbol in the balance report.

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