Books Health runs every accuracy check at once and tells you, in your own numbers, what is wrong and where to fix it. Run it before you hand anything to an accountant.
Find it at Accounting → Books Health.
The accounting equation
The headline check is whether your assets equal what you owe plus what the owners have in the business plus what it has earned. That equation is what "the books balance" means, and when it holds to the penny, every report built on it rests on something solid.
The screen shows all four figures so the answer is checkable rather than something to take on faith.
When it does not balance
There is no button that closes the gap for you, and that is deliberate.
Every journal entry has equal debits and credits, so posting one moves your assets and your equity by the same amount. The difference between them cannot be changed by any entry that balances. A gap can only exist because some transactions were recorded on one side and never the other, and the honest repair is to give those their second side.
Software that offers to adjust the difference away is writing the gap into an equity account and calling it settled. That is how Opening Balance Equity in QuickBooks fills up with numbers nobody can explain years later.
So the checks below the headline name the transactions responsible and link to the screen where each kind gets resolved.
What gets checked
- Debits equal credits. When they do not, the screen says whether the difference is genuine or the expected result of a one-sided source. A bank feed reports that money moved, not which account it moved through, so a bank-only book legitimately does not close. That is stated plainly rather than reported as a problem.
- Bank lines your accounting system has never seen. Only raised when you have an accounting system connected. These count toward cash while nothing on the asset side reflects them, which is the usual reason a balance sheet does not close.
- Money with no category, which lands on no line of your profit and loss.
- Bill payments not tied to a bank line. Until they are matched, the same money can be counted from both the payment you recorded and the bank debit.
- Accounts never reconciled. Until a statement has been signed off, nothing has confirmed the cash figure is real.
- More than one currency in one book. Totals that mix currencies are not meaningful, and a feed that mislabels one currency as another looks exactly like this.
Reading the result
Green means every check passed. Amber means the books balance but something is worth tidying. Red means the equation does not hold and the figures should not be relied on until it does.
Each failing check carries the amount and the count, so you can judge whether it matters. A few dollars uncategorized is not the same problem as a few thousand.