Work with the chart of accounts

Your chart of accounts is the list of buckets every transaction is sorted into. TALISK_HQ seeds a standard Canadian small-business chart the first time you open the ledger.

1. Go to Ledger › Accounting: the Chart of Accounts tab.
2. Accounts are grouped by Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Revenue, and Expenses, with their tax-line mappings.
3. Click Add Account to create your own: set its Account Number, Account Name, and Account Type.

You can edit, deactivate, or reactivate accounts you created, and mark an expense account as COGS. To retire an account you added, Deactivate it rather than deleting: that keeps its history.

When a trial-balance import recognises one of your rows as a bank or card and you connect it in the import's bank step, the account in Banking adopts that row's chart account: the accountant's own number stays, and no duplicate account is created for it.

An account a bank or credit card posts through can't be deactivated while that bank or card is still active, including one adopted by the import step above. Deactivating it would quietly send that account's money to your general cash account instead, so TALISK_HQ refuses and names the bank or card in the message. Archive the bank or card in Ledger › Banking first, then deactivate the chart account.

TALISK_HQ's own accounts are labelled System. You can still Edit one to rename it, change its description, or set its tax line, which is useful when your accountant calls an account something else and you want your chart to match their trial balance. The account number never changes and neither does what TALISK_HQ uses it for, so renaming moves nothing in your books. What you can't do is deactivate or delete a System account: the posting engine resolves it by number, so retiring one would break entries that depend on it.

Your active expense accounts appear at the top of every category dropdown, under Your chart — expenses, whether you're coding a bill, a receipt, or a bank transaction. An account you deactivate drops out of those lists.

Every one of those dropdowns has a search box, focused as soon as the list opens. Type an account number to filter by it (5 shows every 5000-series account, 51 narrows to the 5100s) or type letters to match the account name: rent, soft, freight. Numbers are shown in their own column so the account names line up down the list however long the numbers are.

Setting an account's sales tax

Editing an expense or asset account also offers Sales tax on purchases. It is what a bank line coded to that account starts with: set it to Standard rate and every line you code there afterwards claims the GST/HST inside the amount as an input tax credit, instead of burying it in the expense.

It applies to new coding only. Nothing already recorded changes, and you can override any single transaction from its row in Ledger › Banking; what you pick there is remembered for that supplier and beats the account's default for them. Accounts start with no default, because TALISK_HQ never assumes a supplier charged tax.

Marking the account that holds your stock

If you track the cost of your stock, one asset account holds it. Open the Assets section and use the Stock button on that account's row.

TALISK_HQ never guesses which account that is, and it never assumes it is the one numbered 1200. An imported chart keeps stock wherever your accountant put it, and the number bands carry plenty of accounts that are not what the number suggests. Marking it is the only thing that makes an account your stock account, which is why the button exists.

Once it is marked, code stock-purchase bills to it rather than to an expense account, and it becomes the account a posted stock count brings to the counted value.

Hiding the accounts you never use

TALISK_HQ seeds a standard Canadian chart, so a new book starts with far more accounts than most businesses post to. Tick Hide unused at the top of the page to show only the accounts your book has actually used.

"Unused" means no journal entry has ever been posted to the account. It does not mean a zero balance. An account whose activity nets out to zero has still been used and stays on the list, because hiding it would hide real history you may need to look at.

The page always says how many accounts are hidden, so nothing disappears without a count. Untick the box to bring them all back. TALISK_HQ remembers the setting on that device.

Adding a new account switches the filter off, because a brand new account has nothing posted to it yet and would otherwise be saved out of sight.