What can go wrong with your Balance Sheet reports?
You’ll sometimes find that your balance sheet reports are out of balance and the Net Assets doesn’t equal the Equity. We’ll provide some steps below to help you identify the cause and rectify the issue. These can be different depending on whether the issue is with your actuals or budgets, in one organisation or a consolidated group.
Likely causes:
First identify if your problem is with the Actuals or Forecasts
Run:
Balance Sheet report for a past period to check actuals
Balance Sheet report for a future period to check forecasts
Problems with Balance Sheet Actuals
If your account tree doesn't include all accounts, that will put it out of balance
It's rare but run a Balance Sheet report in the accounting system to confirm that balances
Re-run the sync manually
Review Cashflow Settings, Bank & Equity
Turn on the sync setting for Multi-currency transactions
Contact us for help if you can't undo these changes
Problems with Balance Sheet Budgets
For most accounts we treat Bank as the other side. Use the Discrepancy Analysis reports to review non-cash budgets
Review the nominated accounts to ensure they have been set correctly.
Steps to resolve an unbalanced Balance Sheet
Resolving Actuals
Incomplete Account Tree
For reports that cover the balance sheet, the account tree MUST allocate all accounts, including those that are inactive
Test this by running the report with the original account tree. If that balances, the problem is with your account tree
On the left side of the account tree, use the Bulk Actions button to display inactive accounts
Look for balance sheet accounts that may have been allocated to P&L sections in the account tree. This will affect Net Profit and Current Earnings
Accounting system out of balance
While this is rare, it's worth confirming with a Balance Sheet report in the accounting system.
if that is out of balance, rectify the issue there and re-sync
Fix a sync failure with your accounting system
Re-run the sync manually
If that doesn't solve it, review the sync settings (Organisation Settings, General)
If you are on Classic (non-transaction) sync, select all available years for your next sync
If you are using Xero and have multi-currency transactions ensure that option is selected
Fix incorrect nomination of equity accounts
Review the equity accounts nominated in Cashflow Settings, Bank & Equity
These should be the systems accounts for Retained Earnings and Current Earnings in your accounting system.
For Xero, you MUST use the Current Earnings account which has no account number or GST setting. This account is not visible in Xero.
For MYOB, use the linked accounts for current and retained earnings
Include Unrealised Currency Gains (Xero only)
If you use multi-currency transactions and bank accounts in Xero, turn on this option in the sync settings (Organisation Settings, General)
Fix changes to Opening Balances in MYOB
We recommend that you use journals rather than the Opening Balance feature in MYOB business products but appreciate that it may be too late for that advice.
If you are still able to reverse the changes to the balances in MYOB, do that and that will resolve the issue
If not, contact our team and our tech team will update them for you at our end
Resolving budgets and forecasts
Identify problems with an out of balance budget
Most accounts automatically balance to the bank account. For non-cash accounts, review the Discrepancy Analysis reports to find mismatched accounts.
These typically occur with prepayments, income in advance or inventory movements. Using live formulas will generally keep them balanced.
The Discrepancy Analysis reports are in the Troubleshooting section of Reports, Builder
Fix incorrect cashflow settings
Review these cashflow settings to confirm that all accounts have been nominated:
Company Tax (This can be set to No)