About the chart of accounts

See a list of all your ledger accounts

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 accounts used by your business. These accounts are known as ledger accounts.

Use the chart of accounts to analyze your income, expenditure, assets, liabilities, and capital when running reports. This helps you to see how your business is performing at any moment in time.

Each account has a unique number. (The category you select when creating the account determines where it appears on your reports, so the number can be whatever you choose.)

About the chart of accounts

Accounting uses a standard layout, designed for small businesses. 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 Settings, 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 Category, choose from the drop-down and click Search.

Export your chart of accounts

Send the list of ledger accounts 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 toSage Accounting. You can only do this when no transactions have been entered in Sage Accounting. 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 Settings, 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 ledger accounts.

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

See Import a chart of accounts file

Make changes to your ledger accounts

Create as many new ledger accounts 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 ledger accounts

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

Use ledger accounts to analyze your income, expenditure, assets, liabilities and capital when running your management reports.

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 ledgers for a particular category type, select it from the Category list.

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