If the client's trial balance runs to eighty accounts, typing it into Lacerte one field at a time is a bad use of an afternoon. Lacerte ships a Trial Balance Utility for exactly this, and most preparers either don't know it's there or tried it once and went back to typing.
It's worth the second attempt. It's also worth knowing where it gets awkward, because it does get awkward, and knowing that in advance is the difference between using it and abandoning it halfway.
Opening it
The Trial Balance button sits with the return, alongside diagnostics and e-file. Click it and give it a moment. It opens in its own window and it is not instant, which is mildly alarming the first time and completely normal.
From there you're choosing an import source. Excel or QuickBooks. Most of the time it's Excel, because most of the time what you have is a file the client emailed you.
You also pick the form you're importing into. For an S corp that's 1120S. If the client has rental activity you can import to 8825 separately.
Telling it what your columns are
Lacerte shows you your spreadsheet and asks you to identify the columns. Which one is the account number, which is the account name, which one holds the ending balance.
This is straightforward and it's also where the first real problem hides, and it isn't a Lacerte problem.
Signs. If your Excel file has income as a negative number, because that's how the accounting system exported it, then income posts to the return as a negative number. The utility does what you told it. It won't guess that you meant revenue of $1,000 when the cell says -1,000.
Fix the signs in the source file before you import. Fixing them afterward means going back into the return and correcting every line individually, which defeats the point of importing.
Assigning account types
Next it wants a type for each account. Revenue, expense, asset, liability, equity.
Nothing subtle here, but it's per account and you can't skip it. Work down the list.
The tax line assignment, which is the actual work
Now it tells you something like "5 accounts remain unmapped," and this is the part people mean when they say the utility is fiddly.
Mapping means telling Lacerte which line of the return each account belongs on. There are two ways to do it and they suit different situations.
The first is to pick the Lacerte input screen and then the field. Income to Ordinary Income, then to gross receipts and sales. If you already know where the number goes on the return, this is fast.
The second is Find, which opens the relevant screen and lets you browse. Legal fees to the Deductions screen, then legal and professional. Better when you know what the account is but not what Lacerte calls the line.
Take your time here, because changing an assignment after you've made it is the weakest part of the tool. Put postage on the pensions line by accident and getting it off again is not obvious. You'll be clicking around for a couple of minutes on something that should take two seconds. It's survivable, it's just annoying, and it's the reason most people who bail on the utility bail right here.
The upside, and it's a real one, is that Lacerte remembers. Next year the same client's accounts come in already assigned. The mapping work is a first-year cost, not an annual one, which is the argument for pushing through the awkward part rather than going back to typing.
Posting to the return
Once everything is assigned, post to tax return. Lacerte tells you how many accounts posted and flags anything about the balances that looks off.
Then go and look at the return. Actually open it. Gross receipts should show what you expect, the deduction lines should be populated, and the balance sheet items should have landed on Schedule L. If you got the signs wrong in the source file, this is where you'll see it, sitting on the return as a negative thousand dollars where a positive thousand should be.
What the utility does not do
It moves numbers. That's the scope, and it's worth being clear about the boundary, because the boundary is where most of the actual work lives.
It does not post adjusting entries. If the bookkeeper never recorded depreciation, or accrued payroll is missing, or the client expensed a $5,000 equipment purchase, the utility imports the books as they are, wrong entries included.
It does not handle book to tax differences. The 50 percent meals disallowance isn't a correction to the books, it's a difference between book income and taxable income that belongs on Schedule M-1. If you fix it by halving the expense in the source spreadsheet, the financial statements no longer agree with anything and the AAA is off.
And it does not prove that anything foots. There's no reconciliation showing net income per books walking to ordinary business income, no record of which adjustments you made or why, and nothing to hand a reviewer.
Which is why the file usually ends up with a spreadsheet next to it, holding the adjustments and the book to tax column, rebuilt from scratch for every client, every year.
Doing the reconciliation part properly
That spreadsheet is the gap Ledger IQ fills. You upload the client's trial balance, map each account to a real line on the return, and then do the work the import step can't:
Adjusting entries post against the trial balance with references, so the adjustments column shows what changed and clicking an entry shows the balance buildup from unadjusted through the entry to adjusted. Book to tax items post separately as tax journal entries with their own M-1 and M-2 offset rows, so the book column stays true to the client's financials while the difference is still tracked.
The Working Trial Balance shows unadjusted, adjustments, adjusted, tax adjustments and tax balance side by side, with totals proving each column foots and an income proof that walks net income per books through the differences to ordinary business income. That's the number that should be on page 1 and in Box 1 of every K-1.
The mapping is remembered the same way Lacerte remembers it, so the second year starts from the first year's decisions. The difference is that what you carry forward is a reconciled workpaper rather than a set of import assignments, and it downloads as Excel or PDF for the file.
Doing the mapping and the reconciliation in one place
- Upload the same Excel file you would have fed the utility. Signs and layout do not need fixing first.
- Map each account to a return line described in plain terms, not to a code, so the mapping is something a reviewer can actually check.
- Post adjusting entries against the trial balance. Each one carries a reference, appears in the adjustments column, and expands to show the balance buildup.
- Record book to tax items as tax journal entries with dedicated M-1 and M-2 offset rows, so the 50 percent meals disallowance never touches the client financial statements.
- Confirm the Working Trial Balance foots and the income proof walks net income per books to ordinary business income.
- Export the Lacerte file with the series and tax codes already filled in from the mapping.
- Come back next year to a mapping that is still there, along with the workpaper that proves last year tied.
Supports Forms 1065, 1120S and 1120, with exports for Drake, Lacerte and UltraTax CS. The walkthrough is in the Lacerte resource guide, and it is free during early access, so you can start at portal.ledgeriq.ai and run this on a live client without a credit card.