Chart of Accounts

Your chart of accounts is the master list of every account in your books — assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses. In DayZero each account is a ledger, and every journal entry line, transaction, invoice, and bill posts to one of them. It's the structural backbone of your accounting: get the chart right and every report downstream (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow) falls into place.

Key capabilities

• Five GAAP account types — asset, liability, equity, revenue, expense — each with a fixed debit/credit normal balance
• Templated account types (bank account, credit card, payments, payroll, loan, prepaid card, accounts receivable, accounts payable) that auto-configure accounting properties
• Custom accounts with explicit type, normal balance, sort code, and sub-classification
• Sub-accounts for clean grouping under a parent
• Deactivate (archive) accounts to drop them from pickers without losing history
• System, required, and bank-linked ledgers are protected from edit/delete
• Merge ledgers — reassign all line entries, transactions, budgets, reconciliations, and bank rules into a target
• Apply an AI-generated or uploaded chart-of-accounts template in one bulk pass
• AI account-cleanup suggestions (merge / reclassify) you can act on directly
• Deterministic cash-flow classification suggestions for the statement of cash flows
• Bulk-update multiple accounts in a single request
• Paginated list filterable by type, status, name, or ID

How it works

Every ledger has a type (which fixes its debit/credit normal balance) and a status. Activity flows in from journal entries, transactions, invoices, and bills; reports read account balances by type.

flowchart TD
  coa["Chart of Accounts (ledgers)"] --> assets["Asset - debit normal"]
  coa --> liab["Liability - credit normal"]
  coa --> equity["Equity - credit normal"]
  coa --> rev["Revenue - credit normal"]
  coa --> exp["Expense - debit normal"]
  assets --> bank["Bank / source accounts"]
  exp --> cats["Categorization targets"]
  cats --> reports["P&L / Balance Sheet / Cash Flow"]
  bank --> reports

How to use it

1. Open Chart of Accounts (under Ledger) to browse accounts grouped by type with their status and balances.
2. Click Add Ledger to create one. Use the Financial Account Type template for standard accounts, or switch to custom mode and set Type, Debit or Credit, Sub Type, and a sort code.
3. Set a parent to nest an account as a sub-account, and a sort code to control ordering within its type.
4. Click Import Accounts to open Import Chart of Accounts — describe your business and pick an Accounting Basis to generate a tailored chart, then apply it.
5. Use Suggest Cleanup for AI merge/reclassify recommendations, and Auto-Suggest Cash Flow to classify accounts for the cash-flow statement.
6. To consolidate duplicates, open Merge Ledgers, pick the source accounts and the target, and optionally rename the target.
7. To retire an account, set it to Inactive (it leaves dropdowns but keeps history) or delete it if it has no entries.

Pro tips

• DayZero seeds a standard chart on setup — customize it rather than starting from scratch.
• Prefer Inactive over delete: you can only delete an account with no transactions or journal entries, and never a system-generated one. Inactivating preserves all history.
• Bank/source accounts are not categorization targets — their balances are driven by feeds and reconciliation, not manual categorization, so they won't appear in category pickers.
• Use Merge Ledgers to fix years of inconsistent categorization in one pass; it moves every reference (line entries, transactions, budgets, reconciliations, bank rules) before archiving the source.
• Apply COA never touches system, required, or bank-linked accounts, and it deactivates custom accounts whose sort code is absent from the template — review the created/updated/skipped/deactivated counts before relying on it.
• Keep the chart lean; use Tags for cross-cutting dimensions instead of proliferating accounts.

In-depth guide

Account types & normal balance

Every ledger has a type that determines its normal balance. This is what makes debits and credits behave correctly across the system.

Account fields

Status & protection flags

A ledger can be edited only when it is both editable and active.

Cash-flow classification

Accounts carry classification for the cash-flow statement:

• Cash-flow section — operating, investing, financing, or excluded.
• Cash-flow class — a finer class used by the indirect-method cash-flow statement, which is built from period-over-period balance changes grouped by class.
• Auto-Suggest Cash Flow — returns suggestions derived from each account's type and sub-classification; accept them to populate the classifications.

Merging accounts

• Reassigns — every line entry, transaction, budget, reconciliation, and bank rule from the source accounts to the target, then archives the sources (set to inactive).
• Completion — the merge either completes immediately or, for large accounts, runs in the background.

Applying a chart template

Apply COA upserts a template against your existing accounts, matched by sort code:

AI cleanup suggestions

Suggest Cleanup is read-only and returns merge/reclassify suggestions, each with the affected ledgers you can feed straight into a merge:

• Rate limit — 10 requests per rolling 5-minute window per user.
• Quota — counts against the business's monthly AI quota (over-limit returns a billing error with an upgrade prompt).

Deleting vs. archiving

• Deletion blocked — when an account has associated transactions or journal entries.
• System accounts — can never be deleted.
• Recommended — set the account Inactive to remove it from everyday use while keeping every historical entry intact.

Start free and start from a ready-made chart of accounts.