Streamline the Chart of Accounts (COA) for Sharper Reporting

Deliver High Level Reports by Using GL Headers to Group GL Accounts Together

High level or summary Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports allow users to quickly see the business overall, compare to budget and spot trends. From there you may wish to drill down on a specific type of income or expense to specific accounts to investigate any issues in more detail.

Over time your Chart of Accounts (P&L and Balance sheet accounts) are bound to grow as you add new accounts to track an increasing number of elements of your business.

A quick and simple way to streamline a growing chart of accounts is to use GL Headers to Group GL accounts together, then report at the Header level.

Using MYOB this is done by creating Header accounts then indenting accounts under each header.

Click to Learn how to setup GL Header accounts in MYOB. 

Multiple GL Header Levels Automatically flow through to BI4Cloud P&L and Balance Sheet reports

In BI4cloud these appear as:

• GL Account Level 1
  • GL Account Level 2
    • GL Account Level 3

Use these Levels to Report by, Subtotal by, Filter by and then drill down to see more detail.

Before - Detailed P&L by Account 

After - Summary P&L by GL Header Level

With this you can then

• Analyse by Account and use the GL Header Level to subtotal by; or,
• Drilldown on a Account Level to see the underlying details

A variant is to have group total on top which takes less space

• The totalling is controlled in the Properties side bar

and it's in that side bar under Report tab where the other layout controls are to set out how the report looks

1. The P&L Format which control sub-totals Income, Cost of Sales, etc
2. The Account Level 1 - note that it is indented using the  [ < > ] arrows shown in green box
3. The Account Number

Other Options to Streamline a Growing Chart of Accounts

• Combine GL accounts together
• Use Jobs to track accounts in more detail rather than creating new GL accounts e.g.
  • Cost centres & divisions
  • Marketing/IT or Project expenses
  • Vehicle expenses by MV
  • Travel expenses by employee
• Use Flexi Levels in BI4cloud to add new account groupings and re-arrange the P&L structure using drag and drop (Available in the Cool Stuff- Enterprise 5 user version of Bi4Cloud).; or
• Use GL Tags allocate gl accounts into divisions using BI4Cloud GL Custom Lists (Available in the Cool Stuff- Enterprise 5 user version of Bi4Cloud).

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