Chart of Accounts (COA)

Until now I have been blogging about SAP Business One and its modules in a brief manner. This blog marks the beginning of me starting to blog about individual topics on SAP Business One in a detailed fashion. The first topic that I have chosen is the chart of accounts. Chart of accounts is the list of all the general ledger accounts that pertain to the company. All the accounts necessary for the company to maintain smooth financial postings are defined in this window during implementation. Chart of accounts is a very integral part of SAP Business One implementation and falls under the financial module.

 

Now that we’ve understood what chart of accounts signify, let us see what are the forms that relate to it. Under finance module the first two forms that you see are ‘Chart of accounts’ & ‘Edit chart of accounts’.

1.      Chart of accounts window is where you create and view the new G/L accounts that are essential for your organization’s day to day financial activities. In this window you get assign a unique code for each G/L account and an account name. There are several other functions you can do in this window, to name a few, assign a currency, view the account balance, assign the account to a project.

2.      As the name suggests edit chart of account window helps in editing pre-existing accounts if needed. Some of the fields that you can edit are account code, account name, account type and its location in the drawer.

 

In conclusion, chart of accounts is generally defined at the very beginning of the implementation stage. Only after defining the chart of accounts can we turn our attention to other financial aspects of the organization like fixed assets and budgets. I would say defining the chart of accounts is a combined effort from both the organization’s accounts department and the functional consultant overseeing the SAP Business One implementation.