About the chart of accounts

See a list of all your categories

Export your ledger accounts to a excel spreadsheet

Sort and filter the list to find the a ledger account.

The chart of accounts is a list of all of the categories used by your business. You can use these categories to analyze your income, expenditure, assets, liabilities, and capital when running your reports.

This helps you to see how your business is performing at any moment in time. Each category has a unique category code, although it doesn't matter which number you use, as it's the category type you choose when creating a new category that determines where it appears on your reports.

About the chart of accounts

Accounting Start uses a standard layout, designed for small businesses that includes GIFI codes. If required, you can customize the chart of accounts layout to suit the needs of your business.

If you are setting up a new business, GIFI codes are included in the standard chart of accounts. If you have an existing business, you may need to manually enter GIFI codes for your business. Watch a video about GIFI codes.

Find a

  1. Go to More, Business settings, Chart of accounts.

  2. Use the Search box to filter the list by a by name or number.

  3. Sort the list by Type, choose from the drop-down and click Search.

Export your chart of accounts

Send the list of categories to a excel spreadsheet.

To save time setting up a new chart of accounts in a new business, consider exporting the existing chart of accounts to spreadsheet, make the required changes and import back in toAccounting Start. You can only do this when no transactions have been entered in Accounting Start. See Import a chart of accounts file

The export shows the nominal code, ledger name, control account, category, tax rate and its visibility.

  1. Go to More, Business settings, Chart of accounts.

  2. From the New Ledger Account drop-down, select Export Accounts.
  3. Once the export has finished, you'll see a notification in the reports folder on the top menu.

Import your chart of accounts

Use our CSV file template to import your existing chart of accounts. This is useful if are coming from another system and want to use the same categories.

You can only do this when no transactions have been entered in Accounting Start.

See Import a chart of accounts file

Make changes to your ledger accounts

Create as many new categories as you need or change existing ones to suit your business.

For example, you might want to the change Product Sales to Gardening Sales if you're running a gardening business.

See how to create or edit a ledger account

Print a list of categories

Use the chart of accounts list report to view and export a list of your category accounts.

When running management reports, use category accounts to analyze your income, expenditure, assets, liabilities and capital.

To print or save the chart of accounts list

  1. Go to Reports.
  2. Select the Chart of Accounts report.

    To view a list of categories for a particular category type, select it from the Category list.

  3. To print or save the report, click Export.