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.
Templates are training wheels. The software is the bicycle.
Free to start, on Windows, Mac, iPad and Android. No credit card.