Abstract The article focuses on the origin of the trial balance. Double entry bookkeeping and its procedures found its inception in the spectacular expansion of commerce that occurred in Italy after the crusades. The inadequacy of the crude record-keeping procedures in use at that time, made it imperative to devise more efficient methods of bookkeeping to record the increasing flow of complex transactions of a fast growing foreign trade. The ambiguity of terminology, in the works of the early writers on bookkeeping, has caused confusion among recent writers about the nature of some of the recording procedures and the manner in which they were applied. The trial balance is one such procedure. The duality of entries of the ledger thus, established, Luca Paciolo then turns his attrition to the trial balance as a check on the a equality of the debits and credits. These accounts are of a private nature and should therefore be closed into the profit-and-loss account, the latter in turn being closed into the capital account.
Edward Peragallo (Sun,) studied this question.