New Fund, Copy Chart of Accounts Question

[Chadwick]

Hello
I am in process of restarting the accounting module. I want to add an 02 Fund for Missions and 03 for Building Fund. Should I copy the chart of accounts from 01 to the 02 and 03 funds? Or should I start these charts of account from scratch? Also, if I should copy the chart of accounts and Our 01 is for General Fund and select what to include in each of the new funds, should I then modify the 01 fund to exclude the missions and building accounts to avoid confusion?

Any insight would be helpful.

[JohnDMeyers]

I am in process of restarting the accounting module. I want to add an 02 Fund for Missions and 03 for Building Fund. Should I copy the chart of accounts from 01 to the 02 and 03 funds?

I would recommend copying the chart of accounts (select only the accounts you think will be common) for these reasons:

You will inevitably use some of the same accounts across each of these funds, such as misc income, misc expense, equity, maybe share the same checking account, etc. By copying the chart of accounts, you can use the same 4-digit account numbers for similar items and your consolidated reports will line-up across funds.

You can add more accounts, of course, and these will be unique to your Fund 02 and Fund 03 chart of accounts.

should I then modify the 01 fund to exclude the missions and building accounts to avoid confusion?

I would recommend not deleting the accounts in Fund 01 for the same reason. If you have a misc income in each fund, you will want it to have the same 4-digit major account number so that your consolidated reports will work correctly.

If you want to, you can use sub-accounts in Fund 02 and Fund 03, so that misc income in Fund 01 is 4910-100, Fund 02 is 4910-200 and Fund 03 is 4910-300, or something like that.

I took it one step further and created a group summary account in each of my funds with -000 as the sub-account number (group account), and -101 -201 -301 in Fund 01,02,03 respectively as detail accounts with higher level numbers than the group account.

Then, the consolidated reports show group totals in -000 across all funds and list all the individual account amounts as well. I did this because we have multi-site services, with each fund representing a different site. The consolidated report is more important to us than the individual fund report.

For example:
01-4910-000 MISC INCOME (GROUP level 4)
01-4910-101 Misc income (detail level 6)

02-4910-000 MISC INCOME (GROUP level 4)
02-4910-201 Misc income (detail level 6)

03-4910-000 MISC INCOME (GROUP level 4)
03-4910-301 Misc income (detail level 6)

The consolidated report looks like this:

Consolidated Income:
MISC INCOME
(fund 01) misc income $100.00
(fund 02) misc income $200.00
(fund 03 misc income $300.00

but my individual funds look like this:

MISC INCOME
misc income $100.00

MISC INCOME
misc income $200.00

MISC INCOME
misc income $300.00

so, it's a matter of what you're trying to accomplish.

[Chadwick]

Great suggestions. Thank you.