Plan your chart of accounts
By asking questions and gathering customer requirements, you can plan a chart of accounts that fits the customer's needs. In many cases, the customer chooses to bring in their existing chart of accounts from the legacy system into Dynamics 365 Finance. If this is the case, you need the source data that you create by extracting data or by exporting from the legacy system in a format, such as CSV or Microsoft Excel.
Then, after you cleanse and restructure the chart of accounts according to what the customer wants, you can use the Data management workspace to import the data to Finance.
For more information, see Migrate data and go live with finance and operations apps.
The following questions are typical examples of what you can ask when interviewing personnel in your customer's finance department:
What degree of specification is needed?
How should the chart of accounts be structured?
Have external accountants offered suggestions about the structure of the chart of accounts? Does the customer want to follow these suggestions?
What accounts does the customer need in the system?
What information does the customer need to track financially?
What accounts and dimensions need to be tracked together?
Does the customer need to track the cost center?
Does the customer want Finance to create account numbers automatically, or do they want to create them manually?
An accountant might have an example of a chart of accounts that you can review to determine if it might be relevant for the customer's company. Alternatively, after you create your chart of accounts, you might want an accountant to review it to make sure that it's relevant from an auditor's standpoint.
To create the chart of accounts, you should list accounts that group well together and then group similar revenues, costs, and balance accounts.
Before you create a company's chart of accounts and plan the structure, consider completing the following tasks:
Make sure that you provide enough space between the account numbers so that, in the future, you can create more main accounts between the existing main accounts.
Decide whether operating accounts should come before balance accounts or the other way around.
Review the reporting requirements of the country or region where your organization is based.
Review the reporting requirements of your legal entity.
Determine the degree of specification that's required for external organizations and for your organization.
To track and maintain financial information in an organization, you would set up a chart of accounts, which is a collection of accounts that define a financial framework.
To further track the transactions in these accounts, you can add segments. These segments are known as financial dimensions.
For example, an expense account might include financial dimensions that are named Department, Cost center, and Purpose.
Dynamics 365 Finance has a relational chart of accounts. When you create your main accounts, you don't need to add segments at the account level.
User-defined rules determine how the system attaches financial dimensions to the main accounts and to other financial dimensions. They also help determine how the system enters transactions. These user-defined rules are known as account structures and advanced rules.
Fundamentally, the system groups accounts as revenues and costs (operating accounts) and as assets and liabilities (balance accounts).
Any legal entity in an organization can share and use a chart of accounts. On the Ledger page, you can define the chart of accounts that a legal entity uses.
You can modify the chart of accounts delimiter by going to General ledger > Ledger setup > General ledger parameters page.
To create the chart of accounts, go to the Chart of accounts page. You can create main accounts on the Chart of accounts page or the Main accounts page.
General ledger > Chart of accounts > Accounts > Chart of accounts
Your main accounts shouldn't use special characters that are used as delimiters for a chart of accounts. If you use special characters, you might experience instability, or you might always need to use lookups or the dialog when you enter combinations of accounts and dimensions.