In accounting, the trial balance is a worksheet listing the balance of each leger in two columns, namely debit and credit. The Trial balance is prepared in each financial period as a summary of the closing of the previous ledger. The total of the debit side should always be equal to the total of the credit side. The trial balance thus serves as a tool to detect errors, which may have occurred during the double-entry system of the ledger. Often credits will be represented as a negative, in which case the total of the trial balance should be 0.