Any way possible to have an EMPTY chart of accounts for a new company?

So… Just getting my feet wet – definitely NOT a production system by any stretch. I created a new company and it created an initial chart of accounts but I’ve got an existing chart of accounts that is currently sitting in my master company file (in Quickbooks desktop) that I’d like to move over by hand … but I want to get rid of the auto-generated chart of accounts but can’t. If I try to delete any at random it says things like:

Cannot delete or cancel because Account [ST 6.25% - FOO] is linked with Purchase Taxes and Charges Template [US ST 6.25% - FOO]

or

Cannot delete or cancel because Account [Sales - FOO] is linked with Company [your company name here]

Maybe this is a futile effort? I was able to delete a few that apparently weren’t linked elsewhere but…???

Hi @ps23Rick

There are 2 ways to do it… however in both cases it can only be done on a company which doesn’t have any transaction.

  1. Chart Of Accounts Importer

or

  1. ERPNext QuickBooks Migrator
    Not sure how far this method would work in your case …as you mentioned you have the Quickbook desktop version and the method above is for the online version

Thanks @centaur! In my case I’m not so much interested in importing my chart of accounts as just creating a new one from scratch without having to deal with the old one. I understand though that the standard chart of accounts has pieces referenced in other parts of the database and those references must be remapped (for lack of a better term) to another part of the chart of accounts or deleted I suppose (probably not likely) before the underlying chart of accounts entries can be deleted.

Regardless… If the above methods are the best path to do this then I will give it a shot. Thanks!

Given this is a dev-only system. You “could” accomplish this (unsafely) by just deleting all the rows in the Chart of Accounts.

  1. Take a backup of the SQL table named 'tabAccount'
  2. Remove all the rows via a single SQL statement:
TRUNCATE TABLE `tabAccount`;

This will completely delete your Chart of Accounts, without respecting any Links or database referential integrity. As you navigate through various web pages, ERPNext will probably throw errors. Because default values (e.g. 'Purchase Taxes and Charges Template’) are now broken.

While I wouldn’t normally recommend this, if you’re just experimenting and learning? Sure. Why not? The worst case scenario is you just restore your backup copy of 'tabAccount'.

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Check your company information. Delete all links there. Save and try again to delete the COA. after you have created your own then link them in the company.

You can safely delete the COA if there are no transaction.

this was on a vanilla install – no company data other than the name and so forth… absolutely no transactions and while I was able to delete perhaps 40% of the default chart of accounts the remaining gave errors which is why I asked… I’ll pick this up again after our new server gets setup shortly… thx!

The error message gives you pointers where it is linked. You can delete the Tax template which will delink the COA. Same with company, remove the links and save.

Even the newer server will automatically create COA on setup. This is the default ERPNext behavior. It reduces the time and hassle of creating COA manually by offering standard COA. Most are common COA, maybe the naming is different.

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Templates of Chart of Account are defined in erpnext/accounts/doctype/account/chart_of_accounts/verified/

You could create your own file, dump it there and select it during initial setup wizard.

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Great! Thanks for that!

Whichever way you try, I would recommend not deleting the 5 root accounts. If I’m not mistaken, there were discussions about error or failed import caused by the unavailable root accounts.
I’m not sure but you can try, as Brian said earlier, to learn.