Numbering of accounts in chart of accounts

Hello.

First of all, thank you for an amazing product.

I wish that it would be possible to number each account in the chart of accounts, and use these numbers for whenever selecting an account, instead of the name.

Why you might ask? The reason is, that in some of my clients books, we have set the chart of accounts pr function, not type. That means that some, or many names of the accounts are similar, or sometimes identical.

Another reason is speed. I do tend to memorize numbers fast and I think it would be faster to enter a five digit number rather to enter some text, the select which account is correct.

This feature would also be lovely to have in the import function. Often, I prepare the accounts in a simple spreadsheet with the bank transactions, then import it to the final books.

Best regards from Denmark, Anders Malmros

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Our accountants tend to do this as well they use the accounts numbering.
Numbering also provides an understanding for what category the account belongs
imagine that they might have in expenses
Operating Expenses
–Electricity
–Water
–Etc
Maintenance Expenses
–Electricity
–Water
–Etc

And from experience make the chart of accounts to be displayed as list in a grid view or at least make an option to expand all folders

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@Anders_Malmros there is a related topic in this forum. As I understand this is not the highest priority and the quick and dirty fix that I was advised is to just add the account number into the “Account Name” field.

I’d recommend some sort of syntax that makes it easy to divide those into 2 separate fields later on, so you can easily adjust you CoA as soon a field “Account Number” is being implemented

for example you do “10000 | Assets” as your name for ‘Assets’ then if an “Account #” field is being introduced at any time in the future you can easily replace the string ’ | ’ by ‘,’ and so re-import this as separate fields with a csv import. Does that make sense?

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@vrms Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you might have quite a wait for the Account Numbering to be enabled. I was clearly told that this would not happen and that I was old fashioned in my belief that account numbers were important. I of course totally disagree but I’ll not rake over old ground so just bringing you up to speed.

Hi.

Of course, having a separate field for the number in the account name would bring many benefits. First of all, the reduction of possible errors in names and possibility to easier manipulate with the exported reports from ERP Next (for example, exported TB).

Of course, the account numbering can be inserted to the account name filed, however such approach will require additional manual manipulations in the exported reports.

Also, please do not forget that many companies do manipulations on the exported Trial Balances, once they prepare tax reports. CPAs typically do additional mappings in XLS exported TBS using VLookups. Not having accounts numbers in a separate columns, makes such manipulations harderd and increases probability for errors.

Hopefully the account numbering feature will become available soon.

agree, that’s why I pointed out the ‘workaround’ which might help to minimize such manual manipulations of such reports

If that issue is important to more then one … I don’t have any coding knowledge and therefore don’t really understand all implications adding a separate “Account Number” field would have on the entire system. But it’s always a solution to code this independently (or pay someone to do that). There are several tools to fund such an effort. I personally have no financial budget really and would live with the workaround so far, but I could try coordinate such a project.

My biggest obstacle would be not to have any idea how much funds are needed. So maybe someone who is knowledgeable (and therefore might also be a potential freelancer to hire) could give an estimate of how many coding hours such an endeavor might need (maybe the core team @erpnext might join this discussion by giving an estimation?)

@jkeersmaekers

I think the point of this topic is not the customer numbers but numbers for Accounts.
(‘Account’ as in Chart of Accounts not as in ‘Account Manager’)

Seems to me as if you and @Anders_Malmros are talking about different things

OMG, confusion all over :smile:
This comes from the habbit of using accounts and customers as synonyms.
I had problems with the naming in ERPNext before, so my bad.

Posts remove!

Thank you for a good way forward, I like it. Accountants in my country like account numbers and my previous options seemed to be naming with leading account numbers or adding a custom field that might be made redundant later. I like your fix of using a pipe symbol or whatever to future-proof in the naming.

Here in Spain is mandatory the use of account numbers (they are defined in the general accounts plan: https://boe.es/boe/dias/2007/11/20/pdfs/C00001-00152.pdf, page +81 ).

It is even used for convenience fast accesses such as the ‘character’. To represent zeros quickly.

For example: if we want to access the account (with 8-digit format) 40000045 is written 4.45 and the software is filled with zeros automatically, another example: to access 40500172 would be typed 405.172 …

This is done in all financial software here . Without accounting account numbers implement erpnext here and in many countries is difficult.

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Is this available by now?

based on the work done at https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/pull/10551, this should be ready soon

@felix

It seem build failed and PR closed.
It will be a revise?
How it works?

as I read it PR is closed for now, with @nabinhait assigned to look into this. So I suggest you’d wait for this to happen and if it doesn’t gently push a bit

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Would this help?

@d4mer

How you included the numbers?
What is you version?

If I include the numbers in
https://charts.erpnext.com/
then download the .json file,
and upload to the system
the numbers are dissapear and not recognised by
ERPNext.

Any clue?

Hi Krnkris,

I did it by hand directly in the .json file. Charts.erpnext.com is absolutely useless and shouldn’t be used under any circumstance.

This particular CoA is a specific one that is used here is Spain for SMBs. I would be more than happy to share it but someone needs to let me know how add it for consideration. If it means going through the charts.erpnext.com, I will not do it.

You can just submit pull request directly, no need to go through charts.erpnext.com. How about this?

Thank you for you opinion.

Already done:
https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/pull/10854

It seem it is under development, it is lot
Of things to do.

Hopefully it will be ready by ERPNext V 9.0.

Thanks all cooperation from the development side.

Manually adding the account numbers is a messy solution. Our accountants in both the German and Romanian company require the account numbers. It might seem old fashioned but most accountants I have met could be called conservative and maybe old fashioned, thats the kind of guys you want watching over your money :slight_smile:

Account numbers are definitely required.

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