What is the Chart of Accounts?

The chart of accounts is a list of all of the accounts in the ledger. This includes all of the different types of expense and revenue in your profit and loss account, all of the assets and liabilities in your balance sheet including all of your debtors/receivables, and creditors/payables accounts (for your customers and suppliers).

Every accounting transaction must be posted to a ledger account and the double-entry balancing controls ensure the ledger is always in balance. So, before you can enter transactions you must define your ledger accounts.

SunSystems allows you to create as many accounts as you require. You can add new accounts at any time and, within strict audit controls, you can delete accounts that are no longer required.

Account Codes

Each account in the chart of accounts is identified by an account code that can contain up to 15 characters. This is the code you reference when you want to post transactions to an account.

The system allows you to use any coding structure you require, within the 15 characters available. This account coding structure is extremely important and a significant part of the implementation process is usually spent designing this coding structure to ensure it supports your primary reporting requirements.

Many SunSystems functions, such as Payment Run, allow you to enter a range of codes to select the accounts you require. It is therefore important that similar accounts are grouped together within a logical range of codes.

Each account also has a separate, 15 character, lookup code which can be used to find the account if you don't know the code. For example, the lookup code might contain a shortened version of the account description.