Locating and Protecting Errors of Trial Balance
Errors in trial balance generally result from mathematical mistakes, incorrect posting, or simply transcribing data incorrectly. To locate, and to protect the errors in the rial balance, the following steps are often helpful:
- If the error is $1, $10, $100, or $1000, re-add the trial balance columns and recomputed the account balances.
- If the error is divisible by 2, scan the trial balance to see whether a balance equal to half the error has been entered in the wrong column.
- If the error is divisible by 9 retrace the account balances on the trial balance to see whether they are incorrectly copied from the ledger.
- If the error is not divisible by 2 or 9, scan the ledger to see whether the error balance amount has been omitted from the trial balance, and scan the journal to see whether the error balance amount has been omitted.
The above four steps may locate and protect the errors in trial balance.
