Chart of Accounts

Understanding the Chart of Accounts

Here you see the chart of accounts for the GL ledger underneath and an almost perfect one to one correlation with the popup list of charts (ledgers)

You need to deeply understand this in order to grasp the beautiful simplicity of having one master chart of accounts (GL) which contains only control accounts which are represented by a series of subsidiary chart of accounts which contain the actual accounts that you can post to. You cannot post to control accounts.

Check for yourself that the control account of each ledger matches to one account in the GL account. Only one ledger in the list of ledgers (charts) has no control a/c and this is the master or top level chart of accounts (GL).

There needs to be one real (ie not control account) account in the master chart of accounts and this is called retained earnings brought forward. This account is the "closing account" of all the P&L accounts.