Prove your fixed asset accounts against the client's trial balance, per account, to the penny.
The GL Rollforward & Reconciliation template on a return's Report tab puts a per-account rollforward next to the trial balance and computes the difference. It covers the tax year, with the trial balance as of December 31.
Like the journal entries, it is book basis and carries the Book basis (GAAP) badge.
What the report shows
Three sections, in this order:
Cost
Accumulated Depreciation (credit balances shown positive)
Depreciation Expense (variance only)
The first two carry the four rollforward columns. Depreciation Expense gets a variance and status only.
Account | Opening | Additions | Disposals | Closing | Trial Balance | Variance | Status |
1500 Equipment | 737,500.00 | 251,500.00 | 60,000.00 | 929,000.00 | 929,000.00 | 0.00 | Tied |
1510 Accum. Depr. | 15,000.00 | 61,062.75 | 49,080.00 | 26,982.75 | — | — | Not provided |
Each section closes with its own total row.
The footer states the arithmetic:
Tie-out: Opening + Additions − Disposals = Closing. Variance = DepreciationPro balance − trial balance, to the exact penny.
A row reads Tied only when the variance is exactly 0.00. There is no tolerance band. Anything else reads Variance, and a row with no balance entered reads Not provided.
Entering the trial balance
Type balances into the Trial Balance column. Each cell saves when you leave it. Enter credits as negative amounts or in parentheses. Clearing a cell sets the row back to Not provided.
Or click Upload trial balance CSV. The Supported CSV formats popover documents both accepted shapes.
Format 1, single signed column. An account-number column plus one amount column whose header contains "Balance" or "Amount".
Account,Balance 1500,125000.00 1510,(73847.59)
Format 2, debit and credit columns. An account-number column plus "Debit" and "Credit" columns, which is the shape a QuickBooks trial balance exports. The balance applied is Debit minus Credit.
Account,Debit,Credit 1500,125000.00, 1510,,73847.59
The rules the popover lists:
Rows match your chart by account number, case-insensitive. Numbers not in your chart are skipped with a warning, and no account is created for them.
Dollar signs, thousands separators, and parentheses for negatives are all accepted.
A blank amount is skipped. Blank means not provided, never 0.
Each account may appear once per file. Duplicate account numbers are rejected, and neither copy is applied.
Signs are never auto-corrected.
Files up to 1 MB are accepted.
Blank is not zero
An account with no balance shows Not provided and computes no variance. An account you deliberately enter as 0.00 computes a variance against zero. The two look different on the report because they are different inputs.
If you supply a balance for an account that has no DepreciationPro activity this year, the account still appears, with the rollforward columns at zero and the whole balance as the variance. A supplied number is never silently dropped.
Signs are flagged, never corrected
DepreciationPro saves what you type. If a balance carries an unexpected sign for its account type, it adds a note beside the cell:
Accumulated depreciation is normally a credit (negative) balance — double-check the sign.
Entering an accumulated-depreciation balance as a positive number therefore produces a variance of exactly twice the balance. Enter 26,982.75 against a DepreciationPro closing balance of 26,982.75 and the variance reads 53,965.50. That doubled figure is the signature to look for. DepreciationPro leaves your number as typed rather than flipping it, so the source file is what you go and fix.
Seeing what is behind a number
Click any rollforward amount to open the contributing assets, with each asset's Description, Original Cost, and Book Accum. Each description links to the asset.
Assets with no book data
Cost columns include them. Accumulated depreciation excludes them, and the report says so twice: once above the table,
Accumulated depreciation excludes 10 assets with no book data (cost columns still include them; there is never a tax-basis fallback).
and once under the affected cost account,
no book data — accumulated depreciation excludes 10 assets
There is never a tax-basis substitution. This is the report to check when an asset is missing from the journal entries and you suspect it has no book.
Assets with no GL account
Separately from the no-book note, assets whose accounts are not set up are excluded from every row and named above the table:
Excludes 1 asset not set up for journal entries — not included in any account row below.
Each is listed with its reason and a link to the asset, followed by Fix account mappings on the GL Accounts tab.
Comparison only
There are no plug rows, no editable DepreciationPro amounts, and no button that makes a variance go away. The footer says it plainly: variances are shown for review, never posted.