Chart of accounts

The Chart of Accounts tab shows every account your company posts to, grouped by kind, with balances for the asset and month you're viewing.

Chart of Accounts tab

The balance strip

Four cards summarise the whole chart for this asset:

Card	Shows
Total assets	Fixed assets plus current assets.
Liabilities & equity	Debt plus payables.
Equity ratio	Equity divided by total assets.
Period result	The period's profit or loss, with a note confirming the books balance ("Assets = liabilities + equity") or, if they don't, by how much.

Credit balances

A read-only Credit balances card compares two ledgers you manage elsewhere — customer credit and agency credit — against their matching control accounts (3200 Guest deposits received for customers, 3250 Agency credit balances for agencies). Each row shows Matches when the two agree, or Differs by {amount} when they don't. This card never posts anything — manual credit grants made elsewhere in Gurita are visualised here, not booked from here.

The account table

Accounts are grouped into six kinds, each with its own code range: Fixed assets (0000–0999), Current assets (1000–1999), Equity (2000–2999), Liabilities (3000–3999), Income (4000–4999), and Expenses (5000–5999). Each group header shows its code range, how many accounts it holds, and a group total.

Column	Meaning
Code	The 4-digit account code.
Account	The account name.
Type	The account kind.
Entries	How many entries touched the account this month.
Share	The account's share of its group, as a bar and a percentage.
Balance	The account's balance for the period (signed for income/expense accounts, a plain amount for balance-sheet accounts).

Click a row to expand it and see its own entries for the period — date, reference (opens entry details), description, department, payment method, VAT rate (per tax when there are two, as in the Journal) and amount. Busy accounts show 25 entries at a time with a "Showing 25 of …" caption and previous/next controls underneath the list — plus:

• For income/expense accounts: entry count, net of VAT, VAT included, and the gross balance.
• For balance-sheet accounts: the opening balance, this period's movement, the closing balance, and which statement side it sits on (Assets, or Liabilities & equity).

From the expanded row you can Edit account, jump to Open in journal (switches to the Journal tab, narrowed to this account), or Export CSV.

Adding or editing an account

Click Add account, or Edit account on an expanded row.

1. Account type — pick one of the six kinds. Fixed once the account is created; an existing account shows a locked chip instead of the picker.
2. Code — 4 digits, within the type's range. The field validates as you type: "Enter a 4-digit code", "Code must be 4 digits", "Code must be in the {range} range for this account type", "This code is already in use", or a confirmation that it's available. The code can't be changed once an account exists.
3. Name — at least 3 characters.
4. Depending on the type:
   • Income/expense accounts get a Default VAT rate — the rate new entries to this account start with.
   • Every other account gets an Opening balance — for the currently active asset only. Opening balances are kept per asset: you only see, and can only change, the balances of the assets you have access to; another asset's opening balance is never touched when you save.
5. Department (optional) — a filterable picker fed by the company's configured departments; type to narrow it, or clear the field to leave the account without a department. You can only pick from the list, never type a new department into existence.
6. Payment methods (current assets only) — a grid of tiles, one per payment method. Ticking a method here makes this account claim it, overriding the company-wide payment-method map (see Getting started); each tile shows which account currently owns that method.
7. Active — an inactive account is hidden from pickers everywhere else but keeps its history.

Tip: Every account picker in the module uses the same six groups, in the same order as this table, and lists accounts as code · name sorted by code inside a group. Click a picker and start typing to filter it — the search matches the code as well as the name. Where a picker is already narrowed to one kind (the entry dialog follows the Income/Expense toggle, a supplier invoice is expense-only), the group heading is left off because there is only one group to show.

A live preview shows the code, name, type chip and statement side as you fill the form in.

Note: The seeded system accounts — 1400 Trade receivables, 1600 Input VAT receivable, 1900 Suspense, 2100 Retained earnings, and 3300 VAT payable — are locked and can't be edited or deleted. Any seeded account stays undeletable for as long as it has entries against it.

Importing accounts from a file

When you move over from another bookkeeping program, you can add many accounts at once instead of creating them one by one. Click Import next to Add account.

Who can access this: administrators only — an import can add new departments to the company's department list. Requires the Accounting module.

Placeholder image18-import-accounts.pngImport accounts dialog

1. Prepare a CSV or JSON file with one account per row. The columns are:

   Column	Required	Meaning
   code	yes	The 4-digit account code, inside the range of its kind (see the account table).
   name	yes	The account name.
   kind	yes	One of fixed, current, equity, debt, income, expense.
   vat	no	Default VAT rate in percent (income/expense accounts).
   department	no	The account's default department.
   note	no	Free text — a good place for the account's number in your old program.
   active	no	true / false (also yes/no); accounts are active unless you say otherwise.

   A spreadsheet saved as CSV works — commas and semicolons are both recognised, and a header row is required. A fixed-asset code that your spreadsheet shortened to three digits (0300 shown as 300) is read correctly.

2. Click Choose file and pick the file. Gurita checks it straight away without saving anything and shows how many accounts are to create, how many are skipped, and how many have errors, followed by one line per row of the file.

3. If the file contains departments your company doesn't have yet, a banner lists them: "New departments will be added: …". They're added to the department list when you import.

4. Click Import {count} accounts. The button stays disabled while the file has any errors, or when there's nothing new to create. After the import, the chart reloads and a confirmation shows how many accounts were added.

What happens to each row:

• Create — a new account with this code will be added.
• Skipped ("An account with this code already exists.") — the code is already in your chart. The existing account is left exactly as it is: an import never renames, re-rates or deactivates an account, system accounts included.
• Error — the row can't be imported: a missing name, an unknown kind, a VAT rate outside 0–100, a code that isn't 4 digits or lies outside its kind's range, or a code that appears twice in the file. Hover the result for the details.

Warning: If any row has an error, nothing is imported — not even the good rows. Fix the marked rows in your file and choose it again; Gurita checks it afresh each time.

Tip: Your old program's categories probably form a tree (for example Boat maintenance → Goya). Gurita's chart is a flat list of 4-digit codes, so give each account its own code inside the right range (e.g. 5101 Boat maintenance – Goya), use departments for business lines, and keep the old category number in the note column so you can still trace it. Check the codes you pick against the accounts already in your chart — the seeded chart uses codes such as 0100, 0200, 0400 and 1450.

Related chapters

• The Journal — where Open in journal takes you.
• Mapping — where each automatic source's default account is set, and how the suspense queue (account 1900) works.