Chart of accounts

PulseBooks keeps real double-entry books, and every posting in them names an account from your chart of accounts — the numbered list of everything your money can be recorded against. It lives under Settings → Chart of Accounts.

Most users never need to open it. Day-to-day work happens in invoices, expenses and bank imports, and each of those posts to the right accounts automatically. The chart is there for when you or your accountant want to see the structure behind the numbers — see Journals and Reports.

Reading the chart

Each account has:

• Code — a four-digit number, unique within your organisation. Codes are grouped by kind, so an accountant can tell what an account is from the number alone. Codes are not editable yet.
• Name — taken from the record behind the account (see below).
• Type — one of the five double-entry types: income, expense, asset (things you own), liability (things you owe), or equity (the owner's stake).
• Source — the category or bank account the entry is generated from, where there is one.

System accounts carry a lock icon: they are managed by PulseBooks and cannot be edited.

Where the accounts come from

The chart is generated from three places rather than maintained by hand:

• Categories — every income, expense, asset, liability and equity category you create under Settings → Categories gets its own account. Categories are the buckets you tag transactions with; see Income & expenses.
• Bank & cash accounts — every account under Settings → Bank & Cash Accounts gets its own account in the chart. These are the registers your money actually moves through, used for reconciliation — separate from the payment details printed on your invoices.
• System accounts — the control accounts every set of books needs, which have no user-facing record of their own.

System accounts

PulseBooks maintains a set of control accounts for you, including:

• Accounts Receivable — what clients owe on issued invoices.
• Accounts Payable — what the business owes on received bills.
• VAT Input and VAT Output — recoverable tax on purchases, and tax charged on sales; see VAT.
• Deferred Income — deposits received for work not yet delivered; see Invoices.
• Retained Earnings — accumulated profit from closed financial years; see Period close & year end.
• Accumulated Depreciation and Depreciation Expense — see Fixed assets.

Each system account shows a short description of what it holds on the Chart of Accounts page.

Creating and renaming accounts

You do not create chart accounts directly. To add one, create the record it stands for:

• Add a category under Settings → Categories — pick its type when you create it.
• Add a bank or cash account under Settings → Bank & Cash Accounts — name, type (bank, credit card, cash or other), currency, and an opening balance with its date. Credit cards usually open with a negative balance. Bank & cash accounts are available on the Pro plan and above; see Plans & billing.

Renaming works the same way: rename the category or bank account behind the chart entry, and the chart follows. A bank or cash account that has served its purpose is archived rather than deleted — deleting is refused once transactions or imported statements reference it, because your history still points at it. Archived and deactivated sources stay visible in the chart, marked inactive, so old postings always resolve to a findable account.

Why you rarely need to touch it

Every invoice, payment, expense and bank transaction posts a balanced journal entry on its own, to accounts PulseBooks resolves for you. The one place you pick accounts by hand is a manual journal entry, where the account picker offers this same chart — see Journals. Everything else is automatic.