What is chart of accounts automation?
What is a chart of accounts?
A chart of accounts (COA) is the structured list of accounts a business uses to record financial data. To learn more about the basics, read our introductory guide to what a chart of accounts is.
For single entities, managing the chart of accounts is usually a simple process of creating a list of account codes for each transaction type. However, for businesses with multiple entities, this process can become much more complex, and errors can easily begin to creep in.
What are the risks of managing group charts of accounts manually?
For multi-entity businesses, the biggest challenge lies in manually aligning chart of accounts codes across the group, as each entity's coding structure may be slightly different.
Typically, to resolve this, finance teams create a “master chart of accounts” in a spreadsheet, with each local entity responsible for mapping their own accounts against it for consistency.
On paper, this sounds simple. In practice, managing this process manually introduces the risk of inconsistencies and errors creeping in, mainly due to:
- Misnamed codes: the same account appearing under different names or with codes across entities
- Missing codes: accounts may be present in one entity but missing in another.
When group charts of accounts aren’t aligned and codes are inconsistent between entities, finance teams have to spend hours manually unifying those codes at month end.
Consolidated reporting cannot be produced until this mapping is complete, meaning it can be very delayed as a result.
What is chart of accounts automation?
That's why more and more finance teams are turning to chart of accounts automation.
Chart of accounts automation is the use of software to keep account codes consistent across every entity in a group, instead of maintaining that alignment by hand in a master spreadsheet. It compares each entity’s chart of accounts against a chosen source of truth, identifies where they have diverged, and lets you correct them centrally.
Purpose-built chart of accounts automation tools provide finance teams with central visibility into codes used across the group, instantly identifying inconsistencies and reducing the manual effort required to keep entities in sync.
We built Mayday HQ to dramatically speed up the process of aligning chart of account codes and reduce human error by:
- Setting a primary entity as the source of truth, the chosen “master chart of accounts”
- Highlighting misnamed or missing codes across entities
- Suggesting mappings to the primary entity
- Allowing you to easily edit or create missing codes
- Enabling one-click post changes to your accounting system
This ensures that finance teams can resolve inconsistencies in real time and not at the last minute when it comes to month-end close.
What are the key benefits of chart of accounts automation?
With chart of accounts automation in place, it is easy to keep entities seamlessly aligned.
This enables finance teams to achieve:
- Faster consolidated reporting
- Efficient data analysis across regions, product lines and business units
- Timely, reliable insights for CFOs and leadership
They benefit from ongoing visibility, instead of spending days wrestling with spreadsheet, and the focus can turn to delivering strategic value, rather than time-consuming admin.
How does a consistent chart of accounts speed up the month end close?
Consolidation is mostly mapping. If every entity’s trial balance uses the same codes, they add up directly. If they don’t, someone maintains a mapping table between each entity and the group structure, updates it whenever a code is added, and investigates whatever falls out.
That work happens every month, grows with each new entity, and is where a large share of consolidation errors come from. Removing the mapping step is often worth more days off the close than any single piece of workflow automation - and it also makes the reconciliations downstream easier, because balance sheet accounts finally mean the same thing in every entity.
What else should stay consistent across a group?
The chart of accounts is the biggest one, but it is not the only structure that drifts. Tracking categories and dimensions only produce useful group reporting if every entity uses the same names and the same values - “Sales” in one file and “Sales & Marketing” in another means two lines in a group report that should be one. Contact records have the same problem when the same supplier is spelled three different ways across three entities.
The practical approach is to agree the dimensions the group actually reports on, keep the list short, and push changes out to every entity together rather than entity by entity.
With Mayday HQ, finance teams can easily standardise their accounts, fix inconsistencies and push changes back into their accounting systems. This accelerates the close and allows for a smooth, scalable process that grows with the business.
If you’d like to see how Mayday HQ could simplify your group chart of accounts processes, sign up for a 30 day no-card free trial today or book a demo with one of the team.