Trial balance

An accounting report listing the closing balance of every ledger account for a given period, used to check that total debits equal total credits before accounts are closed.

In a hotel context it is the report your finance team runs to reconcile a period and hand clean figures to accounting. It covers the guest ledger (charges owed by in-house and departed guests), the deposit ledger (money taken in advance of a stay) and the city or accounts receivable ledger (balances owed by companies and agents).

Why it comes up in PMS discussions: many systems historically produced the trial balance as a daily export only, so reconciling a month meant merging thirty files by hand. A PMS that lets you run the report over an arbitrary date range removes a recurring manual job and a recurring source of error.

If a vendor rebuilds this report, run the old and new versions for the same period and compare them line by line before you rely on the new one.