Modern Working Trial Balance

Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and Chartered Accountants (CAs) know what a working trial balance is.  A working trial balance is a core artifact/tool in the compilation, review, or audit of a set of financial statements.  When I began my career in accounting in 1982 with Price Waterhouse we created a working trial balance on paper spreadsheets.  Shortly thereafter I helped to pioneer the use of the electronic spreadsheet for creating accounting artifacts such as the working trial balance.

Today, I believe, I have contributed to pioneering an even more modern approach to creating a working trial balance and other such accounting and auditing schedules or working papers: the model-based, machine-understandable, standards-based logical spreadsheet.


Here is a working prototype of a working trial balance represented using the global standard XBRL that is machine-understandable. It can be effectively loaded into any fully compliant XBRL software.  Here are three examples using three different software applications:

Pesseract: (working proof of concept)


Auditchain Pacioli: (commercial software under development, view the report below online here)


Auditchain Luca: (commercial software under development, view HTML rendering online here or PDF rendering here)


(Note that the above rendering generated by Luca is not fully functional but will be able to pivot the period dimension similar to Pesseract and Pacioli in the near future.)

If you are curious and want additional information, see this Showcase and these working Examples and Samples (prototypes) to help you get your head around all this.

More information:

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