What is balance sheet?
The statement of what a business owns and owes at a moment in time: assets on one side, liabilities and equity on the other, always equal — that is the double-entry promise. Where the P&L tells a period's story, the balance sheet is a photograph.
Example
On August 24 a business holds $783,945,690 of assets against $56,641 of liabilities, leaving equity as the difference. Assets equal liabilities plus equity, always — that is the arithmetic the statement is named for.
Change the date and every figure changes, because a balance sheet is a photograph rather than a story: it answers where you stand today, not what happened this month.
Live from the ledger, drillable from any line to the entries beneath it. Reading a balance sheet →
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