A retail chart to start from
Steal this structure: 1000s assets, 2000s liabilities, 3000s equity, 4000s revenue, 5000s COGS, 6000s+ expenses — and the Canadian tax accounts in their proper places.
What it must contain
- Cash, Undeposited Funds, AR, Inventory (1000s)
- AP, GST/HST Payable, PST Payable, wages accrued (2000s)
- Owner equity + Retained Earnings (3000s)
- Sales, Returns, Shipping income (4000s)
- COGS + Shrinkage (5000s)
- Rent, wages, utilities, fees… (6000s+)
SeroBooks seeds this chart on setup — provinces respected, posting map wired.
The mistakes that cost money
Proliferation. An account per supplier, per customer or per product line produces statements nobody can read — and the fix is not renaming, it is remembering that contacts exist for parties and categories exist for products. Accounts are for kinds of money.
The opposite error is a chart so coarse that every cost lands in 'General expenses', which is technically balanced and tells you nothing about where the money went.
When a template stops being enough
A chart is a starting structure, and the structure is the easy part. What a template cannot give you is the posting map — the rules deciding which account each kind of money actually lands in when a sale, a refund, a card fee or a tax is recorded.
Without that, the chart is a list of empty labels, and the accounts fill in by hand or not at all.