What is a Chart of Accounts Structure?

Chart of accounts structures allow you to assign GLAs to groups. You will find this useful if your business needs to use local GLAs (also known as alternate GLAs) to produce financial reports for more than one statutory body, for example if your organization has companies based in different countries.

There are two types of chart of accounts structure:

Corporate chart of accounts structure – contains the GLAs that are shared by all companies in your org.
Local chart of accounts structure – contains the GLAs that are required for reporting to a local statutory body. Companies that need to produce financial reports for the same statutory body can share the same local chart of accounts structure.

Chart of accounts structures allow you to indicate:

The GLAs that are corporate and the GLAs that are local.
The group of GLAs that is associated with a company.

You can create more than one local chart of accounts structure. For example, if your org has company records for a company in France and a company in Spain, you would create a structure for France and another for Spain, and you would assign the corresponding chart of accounts structure to each company record. This allows you to produce financial reports for more than one statutory body.

Setting up Chart of Accounts Structures

To set up your org to use corporate and local chart of accounts structures:

To make available the chart of accounts structure and chart of accounts mapping functionality, enable the Allow Use of Local GLAs field in the Accounting Settings custom setting. See Accounting Settings for more information.
Create a corporate chart of accounts structure, ensuring that you select the Is Corporate and the Active checkboxes. You do not need to assign default corporate and local GLAs to a corporate chart of accounts structure. See Creating a Chart of Accounts Structure for more information.
Create a local chart of accounts structure. Do not assign a default corporate GLA or a default local GLA to it yet and do not select the Active checkbox. See Creating a Chart of Accounts Structure for more information.
Identify the GLAs that belong to the corporate chart of accounts structure and assign the corporate chart of accounts structure to those GLAs. This indicates that they are to be included in the corporate statutory reports. See General Ledger Account Fields for more information.
Create local GLA equivalents of your corporate GLAs and assign the local chart of accounts structure to them. This indicates that they are to be included in the local statutory reports. See General Ledger Account Fields for more information.
Return to the local chart of accounts structure you created and assign a default corporate GLA and a default local GLA to it. The local GLA you select must already belong to this local chart of accounts structure. These default GLAs are used as suspense accounts when a transaction is posted and no mapping has been defined for a corporate or local GLA used on the transaction.
Now select the Active checkbox for your local chart of accounts structure.
Assign the local chart of accounts structure to the appropriate company or companies. See Accounting Company Fields for more information.
Create a mapping between each corporate GLA and its local equivalent so that when transactions are recorded, transaction line items are populated in both GLAs. See Mapping Corporate and Local GLAs for more information.