What a chart of accounts is
A chart of accounts is the structured list of accounts an organisation uses to record its financial transactions. Each account holds a particular kind of activity, and the accounts are grouped into the main categories of assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses. Every transaction is coded to an account, which is what makes it possible to produce a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet.
The chart is the backbone of the accounts. A well-designed chart is detailed enough to answer the questions an organisation cares about, without being so granular that coding becomes a chore. For a group with several legal entities, a shared or aligned chart of accounts matters a great deal: when every entity codes the same kind of transaction the same way, the results can be combined into group reporting without painful mapping and re-keying.
Chart of accounts in the Cohiva platform
Cohiva Crunch is a full-stack ERP that consolidates finance across multiple entities in real time. A shared chart of accounts supports that consolidation, handling intercompany eliminations and combining results into one set of accounts for the group.
Crunch also provides real-time profit and loss, 13-week cash forecasting and natural language querying of financial data. To see how it works, explore Crunch.