Chart of accounts
Your chart of accounts is the list of accounts your money gets posted to - income, expenses, assets, liabilities. Every expense, bill and bank transaction lands in one, and it’s what turns a pile of activity into a profit and loss statement. It is not the same thing as an expense category: a category (fuel, materials, subcontractors) is a job-costing label that only suggests which account to use.
Growth and up, as part of the accounting layer. Viewing an account
register needs reports.view; the chart of accounts itself needs
accounting.manage.
Connected to QuickBooks? Then your chart is QuickBooks’ own, mirrored here and read-only. Add, rename or deactivate accounts in QuickBooks and they follow on the next sync; what you set here are the posting defaults. See QuickBooks sync.
You start with a real one
LawnLedger ships a chart of accounts built for landscaping - not a generic template. Fuel, materials, subcontractors, equipment repair, and dump fees are already there, because you’re going to need them in week one.
For most businesses the default is enough forever. Add to it when you genuinely need to see something separately.
Adding an account
Open Books → Accounting, then Chart of accounts, then New account. You’ll choose:
- Type - income, expense, asset, liability, or equity. This decides which statement it appears on and cannot be casually changed later.
- Name - what you’ll pick from when categorizing. Keep it recognizable: “Dump fees” beats “Disposal - misc”.
When to add an account, and when not to
Add one when you want to see the number by itself. If you’re asking “how much am I spending on mulch specifically?”, a Mulch account answers it.
Don’t add one per vendor, per job, or per customer. Vendors are vendors, jobs are jobs, and both are already tracked. A chart of accounts with 200 entries is one nobody categorizes correctly.
Talk to whoever does your taxes before restructuring accounts mid-year. Changing where things are categorized halfway through makes the year-over-year comparison meaningless.
Deactivating instead of deleting
An account with history can’t be deleted - the past transactions still need somewhere to live. Deactivate it instead: it disappears from the pick list and keeps its history.