A trial balance is a list of all the accounts and their balances (either debit or credit) extracted from the ledger. The purpose of a trial balance is to ensure that the total of all the debit balances equals the total of all the credit balances. If the trial balance is in balance, it means that the accounts have been properly recorded and that the books are mathematically correct. However, if the trial balance does not balance, it means there is an error in the accounting records that needs to be corrected before the financial statements can be prepared.