You have the client's trial balance on one monitor and Drake open on the other. There is no import, no mapping, no wizard. You are going to read a number off the left screen and type it into the right one, roughly two hundred times, and then find out whether Schedule L balances.
This is how most business returns still get prepared, and it works. What follows is the order that avoids the most rework, the places Drake behaves in ways that surprise people, and the specific reasons the balance sheet refuses to tie at the end.
Enter it in the order the return computes
The instinct is to start at the top of the trial balance and work down. That is the wrong order, because the balance sheet depends on numbers the rest of the return produces.
Start with income and cost of goods sold. Gross receipts, returns and allowances, and any other income go in first. Cost of goods sold gets its own form — Form 1125-A — and the inventory figures you enter there have to match what you will later enter on the balance sheet. Beginning inventory, purchases, cost of labor, ending inventory. Ending inventory here and inventory on Schedule L are the same number, and if they disagree the return is internally inconsistent in a way nothing will flag for you.
Then deductions. Most of the trial balance lands here, and most of it is mechanical. Two lines are not:
Officer compensation goes on its own form (1125-E) on a corporate return, and it is not the same thing as salaries and wages. If the client has a single shareholder-employee whose entire pay went through one payroll account, that amount belongs in officer compensation, not wages, and the return looks wrong to a reviewer if it is in the wrong place.
Depreciation is not typed in as a number. Drake computes it from the asset entries and Form 4562. If you type the book depreciation figure from the trial balance into a deduction field and also have assets in the depreciation module, you will double-count it. Enter the assets, let Drake calculate, and reconcile the difference against the book number on Schedule M-1.
Then Schedule K items. Anything separately stated — interest income, dividends, charitable contributions, section 179, nondeductible expenses — comes off page 1 and goes to Schedule K, where it flows to the K-1s. Meals that are 50% limited, entertainment that is fully disallowed, and officer life insurance premiums all end up here as nondeductible items rather than reduced deductions on page 1.
Then the balance sheet. Both columns: beginning and ending. This is where the trouble starts.
Turn off autobalance before you do anything else
Drake will, by default, force Schedule L to balance by plugging the difference into retained earnings.
That is a genuinely useful feature when you know your inputs are right and you are fighting a rounding difference. It is a serious problem during original data entry, because it means a balance sheet that does not tie will look like it ties. You will finish the return, feel good about it, and have an unexplained plug sitting in equity that nobody sees until someone compares this year's beginning retained earnings to last year's ending figure.
Turn it off before you start — the reverse autobalance option on the PRNT screen inside the return, or globally in Setup. Then, if the balance sheet does not balance, the return tells you so, which is what you want.
While you are there: if the client falls under the receipts and assets threshold, Drake may not print Schedule L, M-1 and M-2 at all. Force them to print. A balance sheet you cannot see is a balance sheet you cannot verify.
Why Schedule L will not balance
This is the question that costs the most time, and it almost always has one of six answers.
The beginning column was never entered. New client, or a return not carried forward from last year's file. Every beginning balance has to come from the prior-year return, and if the prior preparer left the balance sheet blank because the client was under the filing threshold, there is no beginning column to carry forward — you are reconstructing it from the prior year's books.
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Beginning accumulated depreciation is missing. This one is specific and common. Buildings and equipment get entered at cost in the beginning column, but the accumulated depreciation line beneath them gets skipped, because the preparer is thinking about the current year's depreciation rather than the prior years' accumulation. If last year's return ended with $58,000 of accumulated depreciation and your beginning column shows zero, you are out of balance by exactly $58,000 and the number will not look familiar because it appears nowhere on this year's trial balance.
Retained earnings is fighting you. On an 1120-S the equity section is not a simple carry-forward. Beginning retained earnings, plus net income, less distributions, equals ending retained earnings — and that relationship also has to agree with Schedule M-2 and the accumulated adjustments account. If you type an ending retained earnings figure straight off the trial balance without entering the distributions, the balance sheet cannot tie, because the distributions are the missing link.
Distributions were never entered. They are on the trial balance as an equity account, they never appear on page 1, and they are easy to skip entirely. They belong on Schedule K and Schedule M-2 and they reduce ending equity.
Net income is not flowing. Schedule L's equity depends on the income the return computed. If page 1 is incomplete — a missing deduction, an income line not yet entered — the balance sheet is out by exactly the amount you have not entered yet. Finishing page 1 before touching Schedule L avoids chasing a difference that is not really a balance sheet problem.
Cents. Drake works in whole dollars. A trial balance carrying cents produces small rounding differences. If you are out by a dollar or two after checking everything above, that is what it is.
The fastest way to find any of these: take the difference and look for it. A balance sheet out by $58,000 is one account, not six errors. Search the trial balance for that number, or for half of it, before you start re-reading every line.
The book-to-tax items that do not belong in data entry
Some numbers on the trial balance should never be typed into a deduction field at all.
The 50% meals limitation is the clearest example. If the client spent $8,940 on business meals, page 1 does not get $4,470. It gets the meals as an expense and the disallowed half goes to Schedule M-1 as a book-to-tax difference and to Schedule K as a nondeductible expense — where it reduces AAA and every shareholder's basis. Halving the number in data entry produces the right taxable income and the wrong AAA, wrong basis, and wrong K-1.
The same logic covers entertainment, officer life insurance premiums, fines and penalties, and the depreciation difference described above. They are reconciling items, not smaller deductions.
What this actually costs
A trial balance with 150 accounts is 150 decisions about where a number goes and 150 opportunities to type $12,340 where $12,430 belongs. Transposition errors do not announce themselves — the balance sheet still balances if you transpose a number on page 1, and the return goes out the door wrong.
The time is not the worst part. The worst part is that none of it is recoverable next year. The same client sends the same chart of accounts in twelve months, and you type the same two hundred numbers into the same two hundred fields, because Drake has no memory of the mapping decisions you made — you made them in your head.
The alternative: map once, import the workbook
Drake does have a trial balance import, and it reads Drake's own template workbook — the one with import codes printed beside every line. Filling that template in by hand is still transcription, just into a different spreadsheet.
Ledger IQ fills it for you. Upload the client's trial balance exactly as their accounting system exported it. Each account gets mapped to a named return line — "Ln 12 — Taxes and licenses," not a code — with suggestions generated from built-in rules, your firm's own mapping history, and AI, every one requiring your review before it counts. Post adjusting entries, and record book-to-tax items as tax journal entries so meals and the rest land on M-1 rather than quietly halving a deduction.
Then export the Drake import workbook. What downloads is Drake's template with your adjusted balances already written beside the correct codes, the entire trial balance placed — fixed assets, accumulated depreciation, equity, distributions — so the workbook's own OUT OF BALANCE check reads zero before Drake ever opens it. Turn off autobalance, import, recalculate.
The part that compounds: next year the mapping is remembered. A returning client only needs its new accounts reviewed, and the Working Trial Balance shows you unadjusted, adjusted and tax-basis columns with an income proof underneath, so the balance sheet question is answered before you open Drake at all.
Supports Forms 1065, 1120-S and 1120. The full walkthrough, including the tie-out checklist to run before you move on, is in the Drake Tax resource guide.