Importing chart of accounts

By Taavi Hõbejõgi | Published: 20.11.2011

Chart of accounts is the most important part of organisation’s accounting information. By default Margn creates accounts to every organisation. But those accounts fit only for those, who haven’t used any chart of accounts before. In this blog post we give little description how to import accounts information to Margn.

In this blog post it is described how to import accounts from Excel, OpenOffice, Google Spreadsheet or other spreadsheet program. Remember, if you have accounts in CSV file, you can open it with any spreadsheet program and prepare data in there.

N.B.: import accounts only then, if there is no point to type account numbers manually.

The hardest part of importing chart of accounts is defining system accounts. Yes, hard part is also setting correct income and balance sheet types. But lets start first with the field descriptions (* is required field):

  1. * Account number – the field that has to be unique.
  2. * Account name.
  3. * Account type – is this account asset or liability or other account?
  4. * Balance type – with using balance types, Margn creates balance sheet.
  5. * Income type – with using income types, Margn creates income sheet.
  6. * Cash Flow type – with using cash flow types, Margn creates cash flow statement.
  7. Is this contra account? Typical contra accounts are depreciation, bad debts etc.
  8. Balance – this cannot be changed here.
  9. Percent – field meant for taxes, depreciation and other accounts.
  10. Tax free sum – field meant for taxes when tax has some kind of minimal value from where the tax is calculated. For example income taxes often have minimal
  11. Information – any other information about the account.

Couple of questions arise from here:

1. Where can I insert account balance?

Opening balances can be described in the corresponding module: Opening Balances.

2. How to insert balance and income types?

Correct way for inserting balance and income sheet types is to enter them the exact same way that they are described in Margn. For example if inserting balance sheet type to money accounts, their balance sheet type has to be “Money” not “money” or anything else. Only this way you can use Ctrl+v method for importing them.As described before the required fields for every account are account number, name, type, balance sheet type and income sheet type. If all those fields are described in spreadsheet, you can import data to Margn. For this copy data to clipboard, open accounts module (using Ctrl + o or finding it straight from the menu), make the first row and column blue and press Ctrl + v. N.B.: Firefox can be sometimes capricious when pasting data to chart of accounts.
All this is done, what should to be checked over?
  1. Is the amount of accounts correct?
  2. Are all type fields filled? If not, find correct types.
If everything is correct this far, save data.Now you can find correct system accounts. What is system account? System accounts are accounts that Margn uses for creating transactions: all accounts for invoice related transactions, payroll accounts etc. Thus, system accounts are really important part in Margn. Why aren’t they correct? It is simple: by pasting your accounts, it changed your default accounts set by Margn. When opening system accounts module, every system account has to be checked. For more information about every account, click here.There also might become problems when your previous chart of accounts length was smaller than Margn default accounts length. Then if you have set system accounts, you can delete those left in the end of account list.

 


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