The General Ledger Chart of Accounts in Attaché is a summary of all General Ledger accounts and their settings. While a balanced Trial Balance suggests accuracy, it doesn't guarantee that financial reports will reconcile. This is because financial reports rely on specific settings in the General Ledger Masterfiles. Incorrect settings can cause discrepancies or prevent the End of Year process. Therefore, it's important to test financial reports—especially after adding or modifying accounts—to ensure they reconcile and avoid issues during year-end processing.
Follow the steps below to check your General Ledger Chart of Accounts.
Run the P&L Balance Sheet report
Go to General Ledger, Reports, Financial, Standard Financial Reports, P&L Balance Sheet.
Check if the Net Assets equal Total Equity (ie: your financial reports reconcile).
If not, review the reports and try to identify which account is not adding into your accounts properly using the Chart List. You may also need your Trial Balance.
Print your General Ledger Chart of Accounts
To run the report, use:
Go to General Ledger, Reports, Details, Chart List.
In the Options tab:
Ensure no account range is selected from the Account Range task area in the First Account and Last Account fields.
Tick the Include Inactive Accounts checkbox. Note that Inactive accounts may still affect your reports and End of Year roll.
Output the report to screen using Print F9.
🤓Tip: Export your Chart List to Excel and use IF formulas to check setups quickly:
eg: "=IF(TEXT([Add To],0)>TEXT([GL Code],0),"Ok","Bad")".
Place the above formula in a column on its own and replace "[Add To]" and "[GL Code]" with cell references.
Copy the formula to other rows in the same column to compare many accounts
Note that the above formula will return "Bad" for Attaché Heading and Capital type GL accounts as well as for Net Assets and Total Equity all of which do not add anywhere.
Check GL Account setups as described below. Check the following:
Add-to account: Each posting account adds to a total account, which is then used to accumulate totals on financial reports. An account must add down the chart to a greater account code. You can only add to a Type 4 – Total Account. Examples:
Sales accounts add to Net Sales.
Expense accounts add to Total Expenses.
End-of-year indicator: During the end-of-year processing you will want the balance of certain accounts to carry forward into the new year and others to clear. In addition, you may want the closing balance of one account to be the opening balance of another account. Check the following:
Income & expense accounts:
Income & Expense are tracked for one year and at the end of the year the balances are reset to zero.
The EOY Indicator should be 0 – Reset. The opening balance for the new year will be zero.
Balance Sheet accounts
Balance Sheet accounts: are running totals of Assets and Liabilities, therefore the balances are not cleared out at the end of year.
The EOY Indicator should be 1 – Retain. The closing balance will be brought forward as the opening balance for the new financial year.
Carrying forward retained earnings
The net profit at the end of year is set to zero and the balance transferred to Retained Earnings for the new year.
Retained Earnings C/Fwd should be a Total account with EOY Indicator 2 – Closing Balance. This will be the total of the Profit in the ending year.
Retained Earnings B/Fwd should be a Posting account with EOY Indicator 3 – Opening Balance. This is the account the profit will be posted to during End-of-Year.
These accounts MUST appear in pairs, 1 B/Fwd to 1 C/Fwd. If you have an odd number of GL accounts with this setting, then one or more of these accounts are incorrect.
End-of-year account: For Closing and Opening Balance accounts, you have to enter the corresponding account code the balance is to transfer to or from in the End of Year Account field in the GL Masterfile.