Tips for Modifying the Standard Chart of Accounts

A Standard Chart of Accounts is included with Vision. You can modify the Standard Chart of Accounts by changing account numbers and names or by changing the starting and ending account numbers for your account categories.

• When deciding whether or not to modify your chart of accounts, keep in mind that you can create Account Group tables to group any number of accounts on reports, regardless of whether they appear sequentially in the chart of accounts.

• You can alter the Standard Chart of Accounts by creating a Bad Debt direct expense account (by default, in the range 600.00 - 699.99). Using a Bad Debt account, you can associate write-offs, such as credit invoices, to a project without affecting cash. The Bad Debt expense account affects only the project responsible for the write-off, and only this project's expenses, rather than the project's earned revenue and billings.

  For example, if you want to write off the amount due for one invoice, you can simulate a payment by charging the total amount of the invoice to the Bad Debt expense account. The advantage of this method is that Vision preserves the total amount of billings for the project. You can see how much the project would have earned if the client had paid the outstanding invoice, and you can view (by project) the amount of the bad debt expense.

• You can use Other Miscellaneous Revenue and Expenses to track revenue and expense that is unrelated to the firm's normal operations (for example, interest income, or a provision for income tax expense). Amounts in these accounts display below the operating profit/loss on the Income Statement.

• The Net Worth account applies to a proprietorship. If your firm is a partnership or corporation, you must add the accounts shown in the following table, although you can use different account numbers. Be aware that the 301.00 account already exists; you only change its name.

  Partnership		Corporation
  301.00	Capital, Partner A	301.00	Common Stock
  302.00	Capital, Partner B	302.00	Paid-in Capital
  303.00	Capital, Partner C	303.00	Preferred Stock (when applicable)

• Many firms find it helpful to use the same second and third digits for parallel accounts. In the Standard Chart of Accounts, for example, the Reimbursable Structural Consultant account is 511.00 and the Direct Structural Consultant account is 611.00.

• You may not want to enter budgets or history for every single account in a particular category. You may, for example, want to budget all reimbursable consultants together, rather than budgeting structural, mechanical, electrical, and so forth, separately. For this reason, consider setting up a general account (for example, 510.00, General Reimbursable Consultants) for some of your account categories.

• If you use the default account number format, each account number will end with a two-digit sub-number following the decimal point. For the most part, firms use 00 as the sub-number. However, you can use other numbers if you need to fit more than 10 accounts in a group. For example, if you want all of your benefit accounts to be in the range 730.00 to 739.00, but you have more than 10 benefit accounts, you can use numbers such as 730.01.