being able to creating a chart of accounts as needed or getting an existing chart of accounts from somewhere in a simple way would be very nice.
it looks as if charts.erpnext.com could serve for both puposes but at the moment it is entirely not working (could not figure out any usecase yet).
In order to not mislead anyone we should either fix it (am willing to help with testing/functional design) or close it down and like not pretend there was a tool.
what do you think?
Honestly, I have wondered why there were so many chart of accounts. Unless ERPNext does something “special” based on the nominal/gl code, honestly, I think we should have a standard chart of accounts and let people add/remove as required.
I am UK based and am just using the standard account and as I require new GL/budget centers, I will simply add them and map to relevant section on Balance Sheet and P&L.
Thanks
so your point is there was no need for country specific Charts of Accounts? I disagree on that.
Maybe UK is an exception but many countries have specific requirements for the CoA acceptable. And it’s a huge benefit to have a confirmed CoA matching those local requirements.
But that’s not what this discussion is about. Ability to have specific CoA’s available is a given (at least for the sake of the discussion in this Topic).
I am agree we have to fix it or retired.
Actually installation wizard is using this chart.erpnext.com as a source to proceed else how system knows payable account, receivable and so on… to complete installation.
but as of now chart.erpnext.com is not trusted reference in most of the countries in this case we can use a generic one to be adjusted from application.
We supported some development on Chart of Accounts earlier this year and I am sure we will need to do some more. Our goal was to support both a strong CoA for US businesses as well as one tuned for Ecommerce businesses.
Now that we have seen how hard it is to bring the QBO accounts over, we are considering support for a CoA mapping function that would facilitate more integrations that touched Accounts.
In short, my vote is to FIX and Enhance.
Sorry have not found bandwidth to fix this of late. It needs a complete overhaul and cleanup.
Ideally a simple csv upload portal with (JavaScript) validation will also work. Any volunteers? Maybe a 2-3 day job. Happy to sponsor it via the foundation.
“complete overhaul” sounds a bit drastic. From my perspective as of now it would be nice whether it worked as intended.
features I believe would be good to have:
my vote would be
Just out of curiosity, can you explain a specific local requirement for a COA. International Accounting Standards don’t have a specific CoA Requirements? Unless US GAAP has something different?
Just a question about increasing my knowledge of the difference between US GAAP and IAS…
Thanks.
sorry, I do not have sufficient expertize on accounting enabling me to give concrete example(s). But I am certain that Germany has a different Account Tree then France, or India.
I could imagine i.e. that just the numbering would follow certain practices in various countries. Just something simple like Expense accounts using 4xxxx numbers, Assets 1xxxxx.
I have even less expertise in accounting (!), but I have seen some community members say that they are required to use a government-approved CoA. In some cases there seem to be specific numbering systems as well.
For reference, here are where the country-specific charts of accounts are stored:
There are two challenges here that (I believe) push towards a modular or bring-your-own sorts solutions and they’ve already been mentioned:
Either one of those problems in isolation would probably be solvable inline. In combination, there are too many variables. I also think fixing is better than scrapping the project; I don’t think an overhaul is required, but an easier way to reference the output would be great. Personally, I see great value in looking at other people’s charts of accounts and would love to be able to choose from one of those options at the time of setup or to upload my own CoA.
The CoA builder is just a portal on top of a vanilla ERPNext. Everytime you fork a COA it creates a new company. The problem is that beyond a few hundred companies this is not a scalable model. Hence overhaul.
so, could one also enable to export a json file from a CoA from any (local) instance? If the builder is a vanilla ERPNext instance it seems there must be a way.
Just thinking whether it was an idea to drop the idea of a portal and just collect json files (which anyone can produce on any local instance) in a centralized manner.
If you want to “fork” an existing CoA, you just
I know that comes with the price of requiring a bit more expertize (at least you must be able to maintain a local test instance) for contributing a chart, but would do away with that scaling problem.
Also I believe there will be very few people who may have the accounting expertize to contribute substantially, but get blocked away by the hurdle of the more difficult process.
just a thought
My view:
There is no additional benefit of using the charts.erpnext.com portal compared to edit the CoA directly in the ERPNext.
Changing the usage of the portal means having the ability to have a custom CoA which is expected to be able to uploaded into ERPNext. And this is not the current situation.
So, overhauling (or any less dramatic action) would be useless unless the capability to change the default coa in the ERPNEXT is also overhauled.
My suggestion is to be able to select an uploaded (custom) CoA in the company settings.
Hi all,
I fully support this and can also only stress how important a well-adapted local chart of account is. E.g. Switzerland, Austria and Germany each have standardised account numbering systems - each different. And each company needs this as a starting point. Having a good base chart of account would definitely help people get started with the accounting in ERPNext.
Does this have to be a portal or would a github repo do? I am thinking of something similar to how the tax templates are included in ERPNext (erpnext/erpnext/setup at develop · frappe/erpnext · GitHub). So each chart of account would be a json file in the setup path of ERPNext. Maybe that could make things much easier…
Yep, I agree there must be Chart of Accounts for different countries. In France for example, the CoA is set in law! In the UK the Corporation Tax return and self-assessment procedures expect you to have certain figures broken down, so it makes sense to put them in the CoA up-front. Other countries may prefer it in their language, etc, etc. I’ve submitted a UK one on charts.erpnext.com.
However, I agree the charts website is barely usable. The only benefit I see of using it (instead of github PRs) is to give prospective accounting customers a chance of reviewing the local CoA first to give them an idea how much work would be involved to adapt it, but I think this is negligible. I do like the idea of having all the CoAs set up in an instance for demo and editing though.
Could the erpnext foundation demo environment be the place to keep an instance of all the CoA’s, and only allow editing by owners or users with some kind of approved account? Just a thought.
The accounts chart collection page seems to down now http://charts.erpnext.com/
I had submitted a chart for Austria 6 years ago Create at_austria_chart_Einheitskontenrahmen.json by rasos · Pull Request #4849 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub and can’t find it in the verified list, it is in the unverified erpnext/erpnext/accounts/doctype/account/chart_of_accounts at develop · frappe/erpnext · GitHub
I am happy to contribute a well working, nationally used and updated chart of accounts for Austria. Is there a simple way from ERPnext to export it as json?
What is the procedure for making it into the verified folder, which seems to be a pre-condition to be able to select it when creating a new company?