Setting Up Your Chart of Accounts

The chart of accounts is the list of buckets your money is tracked in — Cash, Bank, Sales, Rent, and so on. Every entry in your books lands in one of these accounts, so set this up first. You don't need an accountant: the console ships a ready-made retail chart.

StepsCopy Anchor Link

1. Open Accountant → Chart of Accounts from the sidebar.
2. On first visit the page is empty — click Seed default chart. This creates the standard retail tree: a Cash & Bank folder holding Cash, Bank and the money-in-transit accounts (Card Settlements Due, Digital Wallet Settlements Due, Cheques in Hand, Unidentified Settlements), plus Accounts Receivable and Inventory, under Assets; Accounts Payable and Tax Payable under Liabilities; Sales under Income; Cost of Goods Sold and Operating Expenses under Expenses; and more.
3. Read the row of figures across the top. It describes the chart itself: how many Accounts you can post to, how many Groups they sit in, how many are Control Accounts (fed automatically by other parts of the console), how many still have a Zero Balance, and how many levels deep the tree runs.
4. Browse the List view. Each of the five account types — Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expenses — gets its own card, with the number of accounts in it and its total on the right of the card header. Inside, accounts are nested in groups like Current Assets, Cash & Bank or Indirect Expenses. The groups start closed so you can see the shape of the chart at a glance — click the arrow on a row to open or close it, or use Expand all / Collapse all in the top-right.
5. Every row shows its balance, and every group row shows the total of everything inside it. Balances read as Dr or Cr rather than as plus and minus, so a credit balance on a liability or income account looks correct rather than negative. The figures are today's — the card header says which day they were taken.
6. Rows marked Group are folders. They organize accounts — you can't record entries directly against a group, only against the accounts inside it. A Control badge means the account is fed automatically from elsewhere in the console, and an Inactive badge means the account is switched off and no longer offered when you record an entry.
7. Switch to the Map view to see the shape of the whole chart at once — each type, its groups and its accounts drawn left to right with the totals rolling up leftward. It is the same data as the List view, laid out so a deep branch is obvious at a glance.
8. Use the Search accounts box to find an account by code or name. Matches keep their folder above them, so you can always tell which Sales or which Cash you are looking at.
9. To add your own account, click New account. Under Identity, choose the Account Type from the row of buttons or pick the Parent group where it belongs — the moment you do, the Code box fills itself with the next free number in that part of the chart (the note under it says so), and you can overwrite it if you prefer your own numbering. Give the account a Name. Picking a group is the quicker route: the account takes that group's type and reporting bucket automatically, and the type turns into plain text because it now follows the parent. Always pick a parent group. Leaving it on No parent (top level) does not work today — the save is rejected because a top-level account needs a reporting bucket and there is no box on this form to give it one. If you need a new top-level heading, ask support.
10. Under Behaviour, the Normal balance is worked out from the type and shown for information — assets and expenses are debit, everything else is credit. Leave Currency blank to use the parent's; a top-level account takes your business currency from Settings → Organization. Turn on Holds other accounts to create a folder rather than an account you post to, or Control account if the balance will be fed by another part of the console rather than typed in by hand. Both choices are fixed once the account exists.
11. When the account is ready, use the Save account button in the amber bar at the top of the page. There is no Save button in the form itself.
12. Adding several accounts in one go? Turn on Stay here and add another under After Saving. The bar then reads Save and add another: each save clears the code and name but keeps the type, group and currency, so the next account in the run is a few keystrokes. The check card confirms what was written each time. (The amber bar stays on screen between saves, ready for the next account — it isn't telling you the last one failed.)
13. To rename an account, move it under a different group, or deactivate it, hover its row and click the pencil. The type, code and currency stay fixed once an account is in use — reports rely on them. When you move an account, move it to another group — an existing account can't be pulled out to the top level.

Seeding is safe to repeat: running Seed default chart twice never duplicates accounts.

What the panel on the right is telling youCopy Anchor Link

While you fill the form, the right-hand side answers two questions before you save anything.

• Where It Lands draws the real branch of your chart with the new account already in it, highlighted in green. Change the code or the parent group and the row moves — so you can see it sitting between 1010 Cash and 1020 Bank rather than hoping it will. Underneath, it names the reporting bucket the account will report in and what that bucket means.
• Before You Post is a short checklist about this particular account: whether the code is still free, which group it will sit under, whether it will roll up into anything at all, and — when you are editing — what the account is carrying today and how many automatic-posting rules depend on it. A red cross is a reason not to save yet; an amber mark is something worth knowing. Read them before you save: the Save button doesn't stop you, so a red cross ignored here comes back as an error from the server.

There is no Opening balance box on this form on purpose. An account starts at zero, and money brought forward from your old books is recorded as a journal entry so both sides of it are on record — see Recording a Journal Entry.

Jumping to an account's historyCopy Anchor Link

Hover any postable row and click the book icon to open that account's Ledger — every posted line behind its balance, in date order. Group rows have no book icon, because a folder has no entries of its own.

TipsCopy Anchor Link

• Pick the right parent group and the numbers flow to the right place in your reports on their own — Direct buckets shape gross profit, Indirect buckets come after.
• Hover the Accounts Receivable row to get New customer and Manage customers shortcuts, and the Accounts Payable row for New supplier and Manage suppliers — the people behind those two balances, reachable right where you meet them. (You'll only see the shortcuts if you have the customer or procurement permissions.)
• Amounts across the accounting screens show in your business currency from Settings → Organization (Tax & Currency). Change it there and the accounting screens pick it up after a reload.
• The money-in-transit accounts are there so Cash stays countable. Card, wallet and cheque money is yours but isn't in the drawer yet, so auto-posting books it to Card Settlements Due, Digital Wallet Settlements Due or Cheques in Hand and moves it to Bank when it actually arrives. Unidentified Settlements holds money whose payment method the sale didn't record — a balance there is a prompt to check how payments are being captured at the till. See Booking Sales Automatically for the full map.
• Adding a new bank account? Put it under Cash & Bank. Anything in that folder counts toward your cash position, so the balance shows up wherever the console reports how much money you have on hand. An account parked directly under Current Assets instead is treated as ordinary stock-like value, not spendable cash.
• Deactivate accounts you no longer use instead of trying to delete them — the history stays intact, and the account disappears from new-entry pickers.
• New account and the pencil only appear if you're allowed to change the chart. If you can't see them, ask whoever manages permissions for the chart-of-accounts permission.