Which document summarizes all ledger accounts and their balances?

• A. General Journal
• B. General Ledger
• C. Trial Balance
• D. Balance Sheet

Answer: (C)

The trial balance is a report that lists every ledger account with its ending balance, bringing all debits and credits into one place. After posting each journal entry to the general ledger, you total each account and then compile these balances into this single document. This makes it the best answer because it explicitly aggregates all ledger balances and allows you to verify that total debits equal total credits before moving on to prepare financial statements. It’s also a diagnostic tool—if the totals don’t match, there’s likely a posting or arithmetic error to locate.

The other documents serve different purposes: the general journal records transactions in chronological order; the general ledger holds the individual accounts and their postings but isn’t itself a single consolidated list of all balances; the balance sheet shows the company’s financial position at a specific date using those balances but does not summarize every ledger account on one page.