Accounting: Chart of Accounts How to make the most of the chart of accounts screen for your business. Sharon Mulligan
Chart of Accounts – this is where all your GL accounts are categorised and where you will see the transactions posted for each account as a journal entry. We provide you with a list of predefined GL accounts for your region, however you can still tailor this to suit your business needs.
This screen lists all your GL accounts, this is also where you can add a new GL account. You can also Edit your GL accounts from here for example if you wanted to change the name of the account or level/drawer where it resides.
There are up to 5 levels available which consists of the Drawers, Parent accounts and Active Accounts.
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Drawers are a list of 8 predefined titles Assets, Liabilities, Capital & Reserves, Turnover, Cost of Sales, Operating Costs, Non-operating Income & Expenditure, Taxation and Extraordinary Items – these cannot be changed. These are your Categories.
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Parent accounts are names given to sub level accounts but are not active so cannot be posted to. For example, Fixed Assets, Current Assets and within each Parent further parent accounts can also be created to sub categories further. These are your Category levels.
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Active Accounts are the actual GL accounts that your transactions will get posted to, usually shown on the bottom level. Active accounts can exist on any of the other levels also.
There are several options at the top of this page.
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You can Expand all to see all GL account levels, then go through each page to view them
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You can double click on any active GL account with postings to see the Account details, what journals/Invoices etc were posted to it. Change the From and To dates to see information.
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Hide unused accounts, this looks at any GL accounts with no postings and removes them from your view only this can be switched on/off as required
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Export to Excel, this allows you to export your Chart of accounts list with a breakdown of postings for each GL account - you can add value to this by searching for a specific GL account on the screen first and then export to Excel if you needed to review or analyse it further. See example below of the details that you can export.
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