A chart of accounts you can love
Designing a CoA that scales — neither sparse nor sprawling. Three patterns we keep coming back to.
A chart of accounts is the spine of your bookkeeping. Get it right and the reports practically write themselves. Get it wrong and you'll spend years patching, renaming, and reclassifying.
The two failure modes are mirror images. A sparse CoA — five expense accounts for the whole business — gives you reports that say nothing. A sprawling CoA — three hundred accounts, half of them duplicates — gives you reports nobody reads.
The pattern we keep coming back to: group by economic purpose, not by vendor. 'Software subscriptions' beats 'Notion, Linear, Figma, etc.' every time. Vendors come and go; the purpose of the spend usually doesn't.
Accoru ships with a sensible default chart for small businesses, but everything is editable. Start with the defaults, prune what you don't need, and add the accounts your business genuinely cares about. Then leave it alone for a year and watch the reports get better on their own.