sxsphinxstack

Skills / Working / Manage a chart of accounts

Working Money skill

Manage a chart of accounts

Manage a chart of accounts as a controlled, versioned structure for posting, reporting, tax, consolidation, and analysis.

Account identifiers need durable meaning and traceable change history.

When to use

  • Use for new entities, reporting redesigns, accounting-system changes, or recurring account governance.
  • Do not reuse a retired account number for a different economic meaning.

Procedure

  1. Define statutory, management, tax, consolidation, operational, and system reporting needs by entity and jurisdiction.
  2. Create an account register with stable ID, name, definition, type, natural balance, entity scope, currency behavior, tax treatment, posting status, and owner.
  3. Map every account to financial statements, management dimensions, consolidation, cash flow, tax, and legacy or downstream systems.
  4. Establish naming, numbering, granularity, control-account, subledger, suspense, intercompany, and restricted-use rules.
  5. Route new-account and change requests through documented business need, overlap search, accounting review, system impact, approval, and effective date.
  6. Prevent deletion or semantic reuse. Close dormant accounts to posting while retaining history and mappings.
  7. Version definitions and mappings. Record requester, approver, rationale, affected reports, migration rule, and rollback.
  8. Review duplicate, unused, overbroad, unmapped, manually posted control, and persistent suspense accounts.
  9. Test trial-balance completeness, natural-balance exceptions, report mappings, consolidation eliminations, permissions, and downstream extracts after each release.
  10. Reconcile the published chart to active ledger configuration and communicate changes before the effective period.

Related skills

  • Handle a refund request — Evaluate, approve, execute, communicate, and reconcile a customer refund with a complete audit trail.
  • Manage a debt covenant calendar — Manage debt covenant dates, definitions, calculations, submissions, headroom, amendments, and evidence across facilities.
  • Forecast working capital — Forecast receivables, inventory, payables, and related cash timing using operational drivers and reconciled opening balances.