Trial Balance Limitations
A trial balance only checks the sum of debits against the sum of credits. That is why it does not guarantee that there are no errors. The following are the main classes of error that are not detected by the trial balan
- An error of original entry is when both sides of a transaction include the wrong amount. For example, if a purchase invoice for £21 is entered as £12, this will result in an incorrect debit entry (to purchases), and an incorrect credit entry (to the relevant creditor account), both for £9 less, so the total of both columns will be £9 less, and will thus balance.
- An error of omission is when a transaction is completely omitted from the accounting records. As the debits and credits for the transaction would balance, omitting it would still leave the totals balanced. A variation of this error is omitting one of the ledger account totals from the trial balance.
- An error of reversal is when entries are made to the correct amount, but with debits instead of credits, and vice versa. For example, if a cash sale for £100 is debited to the Sales account, and credited to the Cash account. Such an error will not affect the totals.
- An error of commission is when the entries are made at the correct amount, and the appropriate side (debit or credit), but one or more entries are made to the wrong account of the correct type. For example, if fuel costs are incorrectly debited to the postage account (both expense accounts). This will not affect the totals.
- An error of principle is when the entries are made to the correct amount, and the appropriate side (debit or credit), as with an error of commission, but the wrong type of account is used. For example, if fuel costs (an expense account), are debited to stock (an asset account). This will not affect the totals.
- Compensating errors are multiple unrelated errors that would individually lead to an imbalance, but together cancel each other out.
- A Transposition Error is an error caused by switching the position of two adjacent digits. Since the resulting error is always divisible by 9, accountants use this fact to locate the misentered number. For example, a total is off by 72, dividing it by 9 gives 8 which indicates that one of the switched digits is either more, or less, by 8 than the other digit. Hence the error was caused by switching the digits 8 and 0 or 1 and 9. This will also not affect the totals.
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