The QuickBooks working trial balance is a screen in QuickBooks Accountant Desktop that shows each account's beginning balance, the period's transactions, any adjustments and the ending balance side by side. Accountants use it at year end to see how adjusting entries move each balance before the statements or the return are prepared.
Where is the working trial balance in QuickBooks Desktop?
The working trial balance belongs to the accountant edition of QuickBooks Desktop. Intuit's QuickBooks Accountant Desktop Plus feature chart lists it as a tool that gathers "beginning balances, period transactions and adjustments, and ending balances for any time frame."
That makes it a different thing from the standard Trial Balance report. The standard report sits under Reports, then Accountant & Taxes, then Trial Balance, as a QuickBooks Team reply in the Intuit community thread on the Desktop Trial Balance report describes. The standard report lists ending balances; the working trial balance adds the beginning, transaction and adjustment columns.
Intuit presents the working trial balance as a QuickBooks Accountant Desktop feature. A user in Intuit's community thread on the working trial balance describes opening it from the Accountant menu; that is a user's account, not Intuit's, so check the menus in your version. If the firm runs the accountant edition and the screen or its adjusting features are missing, check which edition is active. Intuit's article on toggling to another QuickBooks edition gives the switch: File, then Toggle to Another Edition, choose the edition, then Next, then Toggle.
Users of QuickBooks Online have a different path. The Online version has its own Trial Balance report and an Adjusted Trial Balance report; the post on where the QuickBooks Online trial balance report lives covers that route.
The QuickBooks working trial balance columns
The QuickBooks working trial balance shows four numbers for every account in the chart of accounts. Read left to right, they tell the story of the period: where the account started, what the client's bookkeeping did to it, what the accountant changed, and where it ended up.
The table below sets out what each column holds. The column names follow the wording in Intuit's feature description.
| Column | What it holds | Example value (fictional) |
|---|---|---|
| Beginning balance | The account balance at the start of the chosen time frame | Accumulated depreciation, $12,000 credit |
| Transactions | The net of everything the client posted during the period | $0 (no depreciation booked during the year) |
| Adjustments | The net of entries marked as adjusting entries | $6,000 credit |
| Ending balance | Beginning balance plus transactions plus adjustments | $18,000 credit |
The transactions column is where most of the review happens. A large number in an account that should be quiet, such as a fixed asset account in a year with no purchases, is worth a question to the client. A zero in an account that should move every month, such as payroll expense, is worth a question too.
The adjustments column keeps the firm's changes apart from the client's. That separation matters because the client's books and the firm's adjusted figures can drift. If the firm's entries are not posted to the client's file, next year's beginning balances will not match last year's adjusted ending balances.
Income and expense accounts are a special case. They normally begin each fiscal year at zero, because last year's profit has been closed into equity. A beginning balance on an expense account at the start of a fiscal year usually means the time frame chosen does not start on the first day of the year.
Posting adjusting entries from the QuickBooks working trial balance
An adjusting entry in QuickBooks Desktop is a general journal entry with the Adjusting Entry box checked. That box is how Desktop marks an entry as an adjustment, and Intuit's chart shows the working trial balance keeping adjustments apart from period transactions. The worked example below takes one depreciation entry through three steps and shows the balances before and after.
The steps come from a QuickBooks Team reply in Intuit's thread on adjusting journal entries in Desktop: open the Company menu and choose Make General Journal Entries, set the date, enter the accounts, debits, credits and memo, check Adjusting Entry, then Save & Close. The same reply says checked entries appear on the Adjusting Journal Entries report, which gives the firm a list of every change it made.
A three-step adjusting entry, before and after
This example uses a fictional client, Example Builders LLC, with a December 31, 2026 year end. All figures are made up for the example. The client did not book depreciation during the year, and the firm calculates $6,000 for the year.
- Enter the entry. Date December 31, 2026. Debit Depreciation expense $6,000. Credit Accumulated depreciation $6,000. Memo: "AJE 1, 2026 depreciation, Example Builders LLC."
- Check Adjusting Entry and save. The entry now counts as an adjustment.
- Refresh the working trial balance. The expected result is the change sitting in the adjustments column for the two accounts, as below.
Before the entry, the two accounts look like this:
| Account | Beginning | Transactions | Adjustments | Ending |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Depreciation expense | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Accumulated depreciation | $12,000 Cr | $0 | $0 | $12,000 Cr |
After the entry:
| Account | Beginning | Transactions | Adjustments | Ending |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Depreciation expense | $0 | $0 | $6,000 Dr | $6,000 Dr |
| Accumulated depreciation | $12,000 Cr | $0 | $6,000 Cr | $18,000 Cr |
The whole trial balance still balances. Before the entry, Example Builders LLC had total debits and credits of $226,000 each. The entry adds $6,000 to each side, so both totals become $232,000. If the totals ever differ after an adjustment, one line of the entry was keyed to the wrong side.
What an adjusting entry is, and why the unadjusted and adjusted trial balances differ, has its own post: what adjusting journal entries do to the trial balance.
When the QuickBooks Desktop trial balance report is enough
The standard QuickBooks Desktop trial balance report is enough when the firm needs ending balances at a date and nothing else. A bookkeeping client with no year-end adjustments, a quick check that debits equal credits, or a balance list to send to a tax preparer all fit the plain report better than the working trial balance.
The plain report has two settings that matter. The QuickBooks Team reply in the Intuit thread on the Desktop Trial Balance report says to choose Custom in the Dates field, enter the From and To dates, then pick Accrual or Cash under Report Basis and refresh.
The working trial balance earns its place when there are adjustments to track or when the firm needs to see the period's movement by account. A year-end engagement with accruals, depreciation and reclassifications is the usual case. Firms that keep their own workpapers outside QuickBooks often do the same job in a spreadsheet; the post on building a trial balance in Excel for review engagements lays out that workbook, and the post on trial balance software for accounting firms covers when a dedicated tool makes sense.
Before relying on either report, the cash accounts should be reconciled. A trial balance only proves that debits equal credits; it does not prove the bank balance is right. The steps for that are in the post on reconciling a bank statement in QuickBooks Desktop.
Can you export the QuickBooks working trial balance to Excel?
The Intuit pages cited in this post do not describe exporting the working trial balance screen to Excel, so test it in your edition before planning around it. The standard Trial Balance report does export, and that is the usual route when the firm wants the figures in a workbook.
Intuit's guide to exporting reports as Excel workbooks in QuickBooks Desktop gives the steps for Windows: open the report from the Reports Center, select the Excel dropdown, then Create New Worksheet, and select OK. A QuickBooks Team reply in the Intuit thread on exporting the Desktop trial balance notes the report shows only the debit and credit columns, so any extra columns are built in Excel afterward.
To rebuild the working trial balance layout from exports, run the standard report twice: once with the dates ending on the last day of the prior year, and once ending on the last day of the current year. Put the two exports side by side and add a column for the firm's adjustments from the Adjusting Journal Entries report. If those entries are already posted in the client's file, the current-year export includes them, so the unadjusted balance is the current-year figure less the adjustments. For balance sheet accounts, the difference between the two dates is the period's activity.
Clients often send the firm their own exported trial balance or general ledger as a PDF or spreadsheet instead of giving file access. Schema CPA reads general ledgers and trial balances among the documents a client sends and exports the figures to Excel or CSV; the document types Schema CPA reads are listed on the homepage.