The balance audit trail displays the balance at the beginning of a period and the changes to the account to the period end.
Reasons for Balance Audit Trail:
To display posting information for a fiscal year and document status in Financial Accounting.
To provide a statement for an external audit.
Legislation generally stipulates that it must be possible to justify account balances at any time for more than one fiscal year using relevant document items. This is possible while the relevant documents are still stored in the system.
However, older documents usually have to be archived and deleted from the database in order to reduce the load on the system. As a result, if you want to explain an account balance, you’ll need to start a balance audit trail before you archive any documents. A balance audit trail generates the compact journal for a specified period in the form of a list. The balance audit trail displays the balance at the beginning of a period and then changes to the account balance at the period end.