How to Review an Unbalanced Balance Sheet

If you have been asking yourself, “What is opening balance equity on a balance sheet? We will go over opening balance equity, the reasons it’s created, and how to close it out so your balance sheets are presentable to banks, auditors, and potential investors. Whether you’re a business owner, employee, or investor, understanding how to read and understand the information in a balance sheet is an essential financial accounting skill to have.

• An easy way to do this would be to include your checks within your scenario table to ensure you can detect balance sheet imbalances in non-active scenarios.
• The balance sheet’s accuracy heavily relies on consistent formulas across all accounts.
• The image below is an example of a comparative balance sheet of Apple, Inc.
• Balancing your small business’s balance sheet doesn’t have to be difficult.

Change in Inventory

A way to check where these numbers are properly incorporated is changing the numbers and see what happens to your balance sheet check. When changing numbers in your opening Balance Sheet, the retained earnings should be the balancing number (net assets less share capital). An opening balance equity can be in a positive-sum or a negative number.

Bringing an Opening Balance Equity Account to Zero

The best thing your business can do is be as proactive as possible and keep detailed financial records for reference. If you want to prevent common balance sheet errors, be on the lookout for red flags on your balance sheet. Look at the time horizon that the balance sheet is imbalanced for, was a certain facility active during this period and no other period, this could be the cause of the difference. This is where we create a second check, commonly known as “Balance sheet check 2”, which calculates the delta between two balance sheet checks. A quick run through each of the Balance Sheet’s closing balances and your Financial Statement calculations to make sure you haven’t made this mistake. Check a couple throughout the row as another common error is to update the sum for the first column and not copying it across the row.

Invoice Reconciliation: A Crucial Step in Business Operations

Check all your totals on the Balance Sheet to make sure no lines are being omitted. This is quick to check and may solve the issue right away (for example, people often forget to include Current Assets in the Total Assets summation). If your balance sheet is still out of balance after, try Advanced troubleshooting for Balance Sheet issues.

Shareholder Equity

If a balance sheet doesn’t balance, it’s likely the document was prepared incorrectly. Shareholders’ equity is the net of a company’s total assets and its total liabilities. Shareholders’ equity represents the net worth of a company and helps to determine its financial unbalanced balance sheet health. Shareholders’ equity is the amount of money that would be left over if the company paid off all liabilities such as debt in the event of a liquidation. In this example, Apple’s total assets of $323.8 billion is segregated towards the top of the report.

Similar to above, sometimes there are errors in the journal entries. Reach out to the Bookkeeper or Controller who is making these entries to double-check. Explore our online finance and accounting courses, which can teach you the key financial concepts you need to understand business performance and potential. To get a jumpstart on building your financial literacy, download our free Financial Terms Cheat Sheet.

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To start, you can work through some balance sheet examples and really put the equation to work. ‘Retained earnings’ is money held by a company to either reinvest in the business or pay down debt. ‘Retained earnings’ are also earnings that have not been paid to shareholders via dividends. The image below is an example of a comparative balance sheet of Apple, Inc. This balance sheet compares the financial position of the company as of September 2020 to the financial position of the company from the year prior.

If your balance sheet still doesn’t balance after all these steps, you may benefit from attending one of our training courses. This is a classic accounting trick; I was taught this while doing my accounting exams and financial audit. This will often help find items where we have put the incorrect sign and in which case have done two debits for example.