Read your Balance Sheet

1. Go to Ledger › Reports and open the Balance Sheet tab.
2. Set the As of date at the top and click Update: the report only refreshes when you click it, not as you type. That date is shown prominently under the title, since a Balance Sheet is always a snapshot as of one day.
3. Read down: Assets, then Liabilities, then Equity. Within each section the accounts are grouped the way a bookkeeper expects, with a subtotal on each group:
   • Assets split into Current Assets (cash, receivables, inventory) and Fixed Assets (equipment, net of accumulated depreciation). Each bank and credit-card account appears on its own line, the way your accountant expects to see them, so total cash is the sum of those lines rather than one blended figure.
   • Liabilities split into Current Liabilities and Long-Term Liabilities.
   • Equity holds your owner accounts plus the current period's retained earnings.
4. Click any account number to drill into the General Ledger for that account, as of the same date, so you can see the entries behind the balance.

To find one account on a long sheet, type into the search box on the date strip. It matches the account number, name, group or balance, and every word you type has to match. Searching only changes which rows are listed: every section total, every group subtotal and the Total Liabilities + Equity check keep the figures for the whole sheet. A note above the sections says so while a search is on, and a filtered group's subtotal spells out that it still covers all of its accounts. Clear the box (or press Escape) to bring every row back.

To see how the position has moved, pick a comparison in the Compare selector on the date strip: vs Prior year (the same date one year earlier) or vs Prior month end. Each account then shows its prior balance, the $ Change and the % Change; an account that has since gone to zero still appears, so a paid-off loan shows its movement instead of vanishing. When the prior balance was zero the % change shows "—", since there is nothing to divide by.

Everything is drawn from your posted journal entries and is cumulative up to the date you pick. Use Export CSV to download it; the download is always the full sheet, not the rows a search left on screen, and it carries the comparison columns whenever they are on screen.

At the bottom, Total Liabilities + Equity must equal Total Assets: a green Balanced line confirms it. If instead an amber Out of balance line appears, a journal entry doesn't balance: find and correct that entry (Books Health will usually point at it); the report itself is just reflecting the ledger.