Your Chart of Accounts

Your Chart of Accounts is the list of buckets everything lands in. Get it right once and the rest of the accounting mostly looks after itself. Pick your Business Entity, and there it is.

Tabs across the top split it the way a set of financial statements does. Assets. Liabilities. Shareholder’s Equity. Revenue. Expenses.

Now add one, because the four fields are worth understanding. GL Acct is your own numbering. Whatever makes sense to you.

GIFI Code is not yours. That is the CRA’s own list of account codes, and it is already loaded. Pick the one that fits what you are creating. Eighty five twenty one, Advertising. So at Year End your books already speak the language the filing expects.

GL Sub is optional. A good habit is to put the GIFI number in there too, so the reference is visible on the list without opening anything.

And Header or Detail. Detail is a real account. You post to it. Header is organisation only, a heading to group things under, and you cannot post a Journal Entry to one. Then name it in your own words. Noodle Advertising, sitting under the CRA’s Advertising code.

Your names, your numbering, and the CRA’s codes underneath. Which is exactly the arrangement that makes a Year End quick.