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The trial balance is the spine of a trial balance binder. Every reconciliation, journal entry, and financial statement resolves back to a row on this grid.

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Import it

You import once, from the Trial balance tab on a new binder. After that, re-imports and updates happen from Settings.

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From QuickBooks Online

The fastest path, and the one to prefer.
1

Click Sync

On the Trial balance tab, click Sync.
2

Connect to QuickBooks

Click Connect to QuickBooks and authorize the connection.
A QBO import also pulls prior year data, which is what makes the financials PDF export show comparatives. Denari pulls cash or accrual figures to match the binder’s basis, so set the basis correctly when you create the binder.

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From a file

Denari accepts .xlsx, .xls, and .csv. The first question the importer asks is how your trial balance is organized, because that decides the rest of the flow: Every mode then runs the same middle steps:
1

Upload

One file, a file per class, or the two statement files, depending on the mode.
2

Map columns

Standard headers (Category Name, Account Type, Type) map themselves. Map the rest by hand, and mark any column to ignore. Tick any rows that shouldn’t come in, such as subtotals and blank lines.
3

Verify categories

Check where each account landed in the hierarchy before anything is written.
4

Review

Per-class and statement imports add a final review of the combined total, so you confirm the pieces add up before the import commits.
The importer saves a draft as you go. Close the tab mid-import and Denari offers to pick the draft back up rather than making you start again. If you are unsure what shape of file to prepare, the importer carries an import specification you can open from the upload step.

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Auto-categorization

If your file has no account types or categories, Denari AI assigns them. Auto-categorized accounts are highlighted in purple so you can see exactly what was guessed, and you can override any of them. Treat the purple as a review queue, not as finished work.

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Reading the grid

A Papers trial balance: accounts nested under Balance Sheet and Income Statement with Prelim, Adj's, Adjusted, Reclass, Ending, PP and Diff PP columns, a search count, and an out-of-balance warning. Accounts are grouped in a hierarchy, from Balance Sheet and Income Statement down through categories to individual accounts. Parents roll up their children. Where the binder carries them, CP, PCP, and PYCP add the current period, prior current period, and prior year current period preliminary balances. Show period dates swaps those abbreviations for the actual period dates. Tax binders add Tax Adjustments and Tax Adj bal. See Tax trial balance. Each row also carries its reconciliation status, its tick marks, and its comment icon. See Reconcile an account and Comments.

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The row menu

The ... on a row offers Reconcile account, Reconcile with children, Remove reconciliations, Mark as ignored, the tick mark picker, and Copy Excel link. Copy Excel link on a row gives you a URL that returns that account’s balance, live. Paste it into Excel inside =WEBSERVICE(url), or into Google Sheets inside =IMPORTDATA(url), and the cell tracks the binder instead of going stale the moment someone posts an entry. Pick which figure the link returns: ending balance, adjusted balance, prelim balance, previous period, previous year, or any of the current-period comparatives.
This is the answer to “I need this number in my own workbook.” It beats exporting the trial balance to CSV every time something changes, because the workbook never needs re-exporting.

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Show only what you need

Display holds both the column list and the presentation toggles. The Display menu open over the trial balance, showing Show zero balance, Show ignored lines, Show period dates, Show totals above accounts, Debit-based amounts and Combine Other Income (Expense), above the column list. Columns are also reorderable by dragging their headers, and Display has a reset that puts the order back. A parent with a zero balance but non-zero children still shows, so you never lose a subtotal.
Your column choices and your display preferences are remembered per binder, so a habit you set on one engagement doesn’t follow you onto an unrelated one.

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The toolbar tells you two things

Search filters the grid and counts what matched, so you can jump to an account by number or name without scrolling. Balance Sheet out of balance by $X appears when the balance sheet doesn’t foot. It is the first thing to resolve, because nothing downstream will be right until it does. Ignore N zero-balances appears when the import brought in a tail of accounts with no activity. It clears all of them from the reconciliation queue at once. Hiding zero balances from Display only hides them; this is what actually takes them out of your queue.

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Classes

If the entity uses QuickBooks classes, or you imported one file per class, the trial balance can be read per class as well as in total. Class views are read-only slices of the same accounts: ignoring and reconciling stay Total-level concepts, because a single class’s slice legitimately doesn’t balance on its own. Classes can also be created from scratch, so a firm that tracks segments outside QuickBooks isn’t shut out.

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Other views of the same numbers

Go to, at the top right of the grid, switches between the views a binder has:
  • Standard Trial Balance
  • Tax Trial Balance, on tax binders. See Tax trial balance
  • Consolidated Trial Balance, when the entity has subsidiaries. See Reports
It hides whichever view you’re already on, and the same switcher sits in the top nav.

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What to do next