trial_balanceRead-onlySee every account balance in one place, and confirm the books actually balance
You want a straightforward gut check that your books are internally consistent before you trust any other report pulled from them.
A trial balance is the oldest sanity check in accounting for a reason: it lists every account with a nonzero balance, splits each into its debit or credit column, and totals both sides. In a healthy double-entry ledger, those two totals are always identical — that's not a coincidence, it's the arithmetic guarantee that makes double-entry bookkeeping self-checking in the first place.
That's also what makes this report unusual among the five in BalanceMCP: it comes back with an explicit balanced flag. If that flag is ever false, it doesn't mean a business problem — a business can be doing badly and still have a perfectly balanced trial balance. It means something is wrong underneath the ledger itself, at the database level, and it's worth reporting rather than troubleshooting as a bookkeeping question.
Beyond the health check, this is a fast way to see where money currently sits across every account at once — which expense lines have accumulated the most, what the cash accounts show, how big equity has grown — without pulling a full balance sheet or profit and loss. It's often the first report worth pulling on a book you haven't looked at in a while.
What this does not do
- Only shows accounts with a nonzero balance — a zeroed-out account (fully paid off, no activity) won't appear even if it exists in the chart.
- A false "balanced" flag indicates a database-level integrity problem, not a business or bookkeeping issue — it should be reported, not diagnosed as a categorization mistake.
Arguments
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
bookId | uuid | Required | — |
asOf | string | Optional | — |
Generated from the tool definition, so it cannot describe arguments the tool does not accept. Unrecognised arguments are rejected rather than ignored.
Common questions
- What does it mean if debits and credits don't match?
- It means something is structurally wrong at the database level — this shouldn't happen in a healthy ledger, since double-entry bookkeeping enforces balance by construction. Treat it as worth reporting, not something to fix by re-categorizing transactions.
- Why don't all my accounts show up here?
- Only accounts with a nonzero balance are listed. An account that exists in your chart but has never been posted to, or nets to exactly zero, won't appear.
- How is this different from a balance sheet?
- A trial balance lists every account's raw debit/credit balance for a health check. A balance sheet organizes assets, liabilities, and equity into the standard financial-statement format, with retained earnings computed in — it's the presentation version of the same underlying numbers.