QuickBooks General Ledger Report

General Ledger, Trial Balance and Balance Sheet: which one to open

All three reports read the same ledger. They differ in how much of it they show.

The Balance Sheet groups accounts into assets, liabilities and equity and shows their balances on one date. The Trial Balance lists every account, including income and expense accounts, with its balance on one date in a debit or credit column. Neither one shows a single transaction.

The General Ledger is the only one of the three that lists transactions. Run it for March and each account section shows what happened to that account in March. So the working order at month end is usually summary first, detail second: spot the line on the Trial Balance or Balance Sheet that does not agree with an outside figure, then open the General Ledger for that one account to find the entry that caused it.

How to run it for one account

Intuit’s steps for the US version: go to Reports, then Standard reports, and in the Find report by name dropdown search for and select General Ledger. Set the report period to the month or range you are checking.

To narrow it, select Filter, choose Account in the Filter by dropdown, and pick the account. You can select more than one account if you are chasing money that moved between two of them, such as a clearing account and a bank account.

To see both sides of each entry, select Columns and turn on Debit and Credit. To see which lines have already been reconciled, turn on Cleared, which Intuit describes as showing the current reconciliation status for each transaction. On a bank or clearing account, the uncleared lines are usually where a reconciliation difference lives.

Tracing a Stripe clearing account difference line by line

A Stripe business that records sales into a clearing account, a regular asset account standing in for the Stripe balance, expects that account to agree with Stripe. Stripe’s Balance summary report is built for the other side of that comparison: Stripe says it works like a bank statement, showing your starting and ending balance for the period, the activity in between, and the payouts to your bank. Stripe’s balance there includes available, pending and reserved funds.

Run the General Ledger for the clearing account for the same month and compare in three steps. First, the month’s net change: the clearing account’s movement for the month should equal Stripe’s ending balance minus its starting balance. Second, the payouts: every payout in Stripe’s payouts section should appear once, and only once, as money leaving the clearing account. A payout missing or recorded twice shows up immediately. Third, the activity: if the first two agree and the balance still does not, the difference is in the sales, refunds, fees or adjustments, and the Balance change from activity section breaks Stripe’s side down by category so you can compare category totals against the ledger.

The usual findings are small and specific: a refund recorded against income but never taken out of the clearing account, a fee month that was never entered, a hand-typed journal entry to the clearing account that duplicates something already there, or a sale deposited straight to the bank account instead of the clearing account. Each one appears as a line in the General Ledger that has no counterpart in Stripe, or a Stripe total with no line in the ledger.

Keeping it readable

An unfiltered General Ledger for a year on an active file can run to thousands of lines, most of them irrelevant to the question you are asking. Filter to the account, set the shortest period that covers the problem, and only then widen it.

For a monthly check, use the same view every time: the clearing account alone, the calendar month, and the Debit, Credit and Cleared columns turned on. The same layout month after month makes an unusual line easier to spot.