Overview of Accounts and the Trial Balance

Modified on Thu, 13 Feb at 4:35 PM

Overview

Once you are ready to prepare a tax return for an entity, you will need to open a tax year, and enter data to perform the tax calculation. Most of the work on a tax return is performed from the 'Trial Balance' screen. This article provides an overview of each section of the screen, and what actions you will subsequently take to import data.

Accessing a Tax Return

From your home screen, navigate to the entity you wish to prepare a return for, and select "open" under the "income tax" column, to access the most recent open tax return for the entity. if you don't see any open tax returns, you will need to Add a Subscription to your entity.

Selecting "open" will take you into a summary view of the most recent tax return for that entity. To access the data that makes up that tax return, or to begin adding data to your tax return, select Workpapers > Accounts from the top navigation bar. This will take you to your Accounts page, where you can see the different data sources that make up your tax return. If you have prefill data from Inland Revenue (IR) directly imported to your return, you will see this here.

Selecting "Trial Balance" will take you to your trial balance screen, where you can import other financial data, add workpapers, and view your tax calculation.

Navigating the trial balance

At the top of your trial balance you will see 6 tabs: All Accounts, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Unassigned, IR10 (NZ) or tax Return (AU), and Chart of Account. Once you import data to your trial balance, these tabs will start populate, and you can begin categorising your data further. TaxLab takes data you have categorised into the Balance Sheet and Income Statement, and uses this to start calculating the tax return.

Overview of importing data to the trial balance

You can get data into your tax return either by importing it directly, from Microsoft Excel or Xero, or adding accounts one by one, by selecting the "new" button. We recommend importing data as it is quicker and can usually be done direct from your source.

The settings cog, to the left of the "new" button, contains some additional actions. You can export your trial balance data to excel, hide all trial balance items with a $0 balance, or add a new data source. adding a new data source is useful if you have part-year data from different sources, e.g. excel for 6 months, and Xero for 6 months.

The "All Accounts" section allows you to see totals for unassigned or hidden items, and whether your trial balance is correctly coded, and therefore balanced.

Overview of the tax calculation panel

Once you have added and assigned accounts, TaxLab calculates the profit (or loss) before tax. You can see this on the Summary panel on the right of the screen, along with the calculated tax amounts.

Troubleshooting

If your cog icon ever turns orange, it means that your trial balance is not balanced. This can occur if you are manually adding accounts, and haven't balanced them correctly. It can also occur if you have imported excel data and not all line items have imported, or you have imported accounts from another system (such as XPA) that are only used for recording amounts in notes to the accounts. Selecting the orange cog item will indicate how much your trial balance is out of balance by. We recommend you check this is balanced before starting work, to ensure your data has been imported correctly.

What's next?

Now that you have an overview of the trial balance screen, you can import your data from Xero, or import your data from Excel.