Amy is reviewing her company’s Chart of Accounts in Business Central and deciding if she should add grouping and totaling accounts. She likes what she sees in the demo data and wonders why the controller before her didn’t do this in their system.
To help make her decision, she decides to reach out to people she met at recent Business Central user group meetings.
Susan – Accounting Manager at a janitorial supply company
Susan is new to Business Central but has more than 10 years’ experience with other ERP systems. When asked if you should include headings and totaling accounts in your Chart of Accounts, she very quickly responded, “The Chart of Accounts is not a report, it’s a list of the accounts to which you post financial transactions. This is no place for headings or totals.”
Asked if she considered the benefits of adding headings and totaling accounts before making her decision, Susan responded that headings, totals and anything not a posting account is just clutter in the Chart of Accounts and can make it harder to create financial report row definitions. Amy decides that any further discussion with Susan won’t gain her anything, she has made it very clear that she thinks only posting accounts belong in the Chart of Accounts. One vote for “Not to Total” in the Chart of Accounts.
Are heading and totaling accounts in G/L Account Lookup lists?
Before her next call, Amy confirms that adding heading or totaling accounts to your Chart of Accounts doesn’t add to the lookup lists from transactions. Not sure why Susan was so adamant about only posting accounts in the Chart of Accounts, and not really getting a good reason not to add heading and totaling accounts, Amy decides to make another call.
Janice – Controller at a small manufacturer
Janice has been using NAV and now Business Central for almost 10 years. Janice explained that when using NAV, they did not use the heading and totaling accounts in the Chart of Accounts. The option was available, but their consultant at the time didn’t even show them how to use them. When it came time to upgrade, with the help of a new consultant, they set them up. Janice no longer runs many of the printed reports she did in NAV. She uses the Chart of Accounts list page for most of her work only printing the financial reports for management each month.
For example, from the Chart of Accounts she can easily “Filter Totals by” the current month so that the amount she sees in Net Change is sum of current month entries, the amount in Balance at Date is sum of entries through the last date of the month, and Balance is the unfiltered amount. She also filters the amounts by department, one of her Global Dimensions. It is easy to change the filters to see the different results without requesting a new report. And finally, she loves the fact that her Chart of Accounts now has total income, total cost of goods sold, total expenses and net income. If something doesn’t look right in the totals, she just drills down into the general ledger entries from the balance column of the accounts in each grouping. No more flipping between reports and entry list pages. She can get to everything from the Chart of Accounts and quickly back again.
Amy asked if the extra heading and totaling accounts are “clutter” in the Chart of Accounts. Janice said no, but if she wants to see only posting accounts, she can filter to Posting Type and save the filtered list as a view. To keep her financial reports simple, she doesn’t use the totaling accounts, she writes her reports using only posting accounts and defines totaling in the financial report row definitions.
However, Janice was also quick to state that the great thing about Business Central is the flexibility it provides. You do need to set up posting accounts, but it is up to each company to determine if heading and totaling accounts belong or are needed in their Chart of Accounts. One vote “To Total” in the Chart of Accounts.
What do you recommend?
So, what would you recommend to Amy? To total or not to total, that is the question.
The Righter WayTM to set up the Chart of Accounts is up to each organization. Business Central provides you with options.
