AccountingBLOCK - Tax and Accounting Forums

When posting the accounts to the trial balance, one of my accounts payable is a 0 balance, do i put that in my post closing trial balance page or no?

no you do not. you only do that when there is money in the debit or credit column. you would usually make a line through accounts payable to show no balance.

I Think flexdeck is correct. even if you record that in the credit side also it will not make any difference in the trial balance. So you are allowed not to record that account in the trial balance.

What is trial balance?

Those who are even a bit familiar to accounting must have had the gist; the trial balance we are talking about gets ready after every financial period meets completion to summarize the ledger of that period getting closed. The debit side must equal the credit side in a successful trial balance; if not, it denotes some sort of error in the double-entry system of the closed ledger. Credits are represented in a trial balance as a negative, rendering an apparently perfect trial balance as 0.

How is it calculated?

The purpose of calculating trial balance is to verify whether the sum of the debits is equal to the sum of the credits. It is prepared by considering the grand total of each of the two sides in every ledger account, in two ways:

• Total Method: In this method, both the debit and credit sides are summed up and placed in a single column.

• Balance Method: This process involves calculating the difference between every account. If the debit side appears greater, then the difference is inserted on an account’s credit side. This is called debit balance. Similarly, if credit side is bigger, the insertion occurs on the debit side. This is credit balance. The list of balances or the Trial Balance is then prepared by putting the debits and credits balances in individual columns.

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I tend to leave all the accounts on the trial balance even if they are zero balance accounts. just because they are zero balance accounts does not mean that dont have any activity. For instance we have a clearing account for our payroll. The balance is zero-ed out pretty quickly, but if i were to pass my trial balance on to an auditor it would make them aware i have multiple cash accounts rather then just one operating account. Same with your AP account, say this account has a zero balance as a result of an improper entry that was previously booked and it actually should have a balance. It doesnt hurt anyone or anything to have a few zero balance accounts on the trial balance. Un-used or inactivate accounts can be deleted if they dont have a balance.