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. Each account is a row you can open: click it to see what the account is for and every setting it carries, each with a plain explanation of what changing it does.
3. Click Add Account to create your own: set its Account Number, Account Name, and Account Type.

The row itself states facts: the number, the name, a System pill on TALISK_HQ's own accounts, and a pill for each state the account carries (Stock, COGS, Can settle, Hidden, Inactive, its tax line). The one button on the row is Move balance. Everything that changes a setting lives in the opened row, beside its explanation.

You can edit, deactivate, delete, or reactivate accounts you created, and mark an expense account as COGS.

Deactivate is how you retire an account that has been used: nothing new can be recorded to it, and everything already on it stays in your reports.

Delete removes it for good, and TALISK_HQ offers it only when nothing has ever been recorded to the account. It is the answer for a row that should not be there at all, rather than one you have finished with: an account created by mistake, or a duplicate left behind when an import was corrected. Open the account's row, scroll to Delete this account, and TALISK_HQ asks you to confirm before it goes.

If Delete is not on offer, the account is carrying something. An account with entries against it can only be deactivated, because deleting it would take that history with it. One of TALISK_HQ's own accounts can be neither deleted nor deactivated. TALISK_HQ also holds on to an account a bank or card posts through, one your book is using for something it posts automatically, and one another account, bill or invoice still points at, and says which it is.

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 wear a System pill beside their name. You can still Edit one (open its row: Name & details) 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. That holds even on a brand-new book where nothing has been recorded yet.

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. A hidden account moves into the dropdown's collapsed TALISK_HQ's standard accounts group instead of disappearing: searching by its name or number still finds it, and the "Show TALISK_HQ's standard accounts" control lists it.

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.

When you bring your own chart

If you upload your accountant's chart of accounts, or a trial balance TALISK_HQ builds your chart from, you keep their numbering and their names. TALISK_HQ then adds the handful of accounts its own bookkeeping needs in order to post, and tells you which ones it added and why, right there in the import.

These are the accounts every set of books needs a system to have: cash, accounts receivable, accounts payable, the sales tax accounts, the input tax credit accounts, and the accounts your ecommerce sales and refunds post through. QuickBooks and Xero create the same kind of accounts for you and lock them, so your accountant will expect to see them.

Three things worth knowing:

• TALISK_HQ does not copy its own expense list onto your chart. Your expense accounts are yours. Only the accounts with no substitute get added, which is why an imported chart stays close to the size your accountant sent.
• Rename any of them to match your own wording. TALISK_HQ resolves these accounts by NUMBER, never by name, so renaming changes nothing about where your money posts. If your accountant calls 2100 "GST/HST Charged on Sales", call it that.
• TALISK_HQ's built-in category names stop appearing in the dropdowns. Every category dropdown offers a standard list of expense category names to a book that has no expense accounts of its own. Once your book has them, whether you added them yourself or an import built them, that list is gone: it names the same spending a second time, and picking from it posts through TALISK_HQ's own mapping instead of to your account. A bill or transaction coded to one of those names earlier keeps it, and the picker still shows it there.

If your chart already has all of them, nothing is added and nothing is said.

Your accountant's own account stays exactly where it is, even when it covers similar ground. If their chart has a GST account at their own number and TALISK_HQ adds 2100, you end up with both, and the sales tax TALISK_HQ collects on your behalf posts to 2100. Move a balance between the two with Move balance on the Chart of Accounts screen if you want them in one place.

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, open that account's row, and switch Stock on under Stock on hand. The row then wears a Stock pill.

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 switch exists.

Some asset accounts never offer it, and that is deliberate: your bank and card accounts, and the accounts TALISK_HQ's own bookkeeping posts through, cannot hold stock. A count that rewrote one of those would move money that has nothing to do with your shelves.

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.

Marking income that is not a sale

Some income is not a sale of your goods or services. Interest on a bank balance or a GIC is the common one: the bank is providing that service to you, not the other way round, so there is no sale of yours behind it. An exchange gain and a cash rounding are the same shape.

CRA asks for sales and other revenue from supplies on line 101 of the GST/HST return, and a supply means something you provide. Income with no supply of yours behind it does not belong in that figure.

Open the Revenue section, open the account's row, and switch Exclude from line 101 on under GST/HST return. The row then wears a Not in Sales (Out of Scope) pill. TALISK_HQ seeds Interest Income, Foreign Exchange Gain and Cash Over/Short already excluded; do the same for any of your own accounts that fit.

Out of scope is the tax code QuickBooks and Xero both use for this, so your accountant will recognise it. It is the one that means there was no supply behind the income at all, as against exempt, which is a supply you made that carries no tax. Exempt supplies do belong in the sales figure; out-of-scope income does not.

It changes reporting only. The account keeps every dollar posted to it, it stays on your profit and loss, and it still counts toward your net income. The one thing that changes is the sales figure on your GST/HST return, and the worksheet shows what it left out so you can reconcile the two.

If you are not sure, leave it unmarked. Revenue that belongs on line 101 and is missing from it understates your return, which is the direction that matters; revenue that should not be there does not change the tax you owe.

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. When you bring your own chart in through a trial-balance import, TALISK_HQ tucks the seeded accounts your import did not claim out of view for you, on every device: the hide lives on the account itself, not in a browser setting. You can also hide one of your own unused accounts yourself with Hide in its opened row, and bring any account back with Unhide in the same place. An account that cannot be hidden says why, right there: one holding entries, or one a bank or card posts through, stays visible.

An account is only ever hidden when nothing has been posted to it. Money is never tucked out of view: an account with journal entries cannot be hidden, and a hidden account comes back on its own the moment an entry lands on it. A hidden account still works exactly as before behind the scenes; hiding changes what the chart shows, never where anything posts.

The page always says how many accounts are hidden, so nothing disappears without a count. Tick Show hidden to see them, each marked Hidden on its row. Searching also reaches them: type a hidden account's name or number and it appears in the results, marked, whether or not the box is ticked.

A brand new account is never hidden, so adding one always shows it right away.

The setup wizard can put a new book into that state deliberately. If you choose Start with a clean list while setting your books up, TALISK_HQ still creates every account behind the scenes so your books post correctly from day one, and hides them all until something is recorded to one. Your chart then fills itself in: the first bill, sale or bank line brings back the account it lands on, by itself.