Accounting glossary

What is chart of accounts?

The organized list of every account the ledger posts to — assets, liabilities, equity, income, expenses. A good chart is the difference between statements that explain the business and statements that merely total it.

Example

A small retailer's chart might run to about a hundred accounts: Cash, Accounts Receivable, Inventory Asset, GST/HST Payable, PST Payable, Sales, Cost of Goods Sold, Rent, Wages, and so on.

The test of a good chart is readability: if your P&L has forty expense lines you cannot summarize, the chart is too granular; if it has three, it is too coarse.

In SeroBooks

A Canadian retail chart ships seeded, with controlled add/edit/deactivate. Chart of accounts

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