May 18th, 2021

How to remap a chart of accounts for a multi-entity business?

In this bite-sized how-to, we share a video and look at how you can re-map your chart of accounts across a multi-entity business within Joiin to make consolidated reporting even more effective.

Remapping your chart of accounts in Joiin

Using spreadsheets to create consolidated financial reports for multi-entity businesses is a real pain point. Time-consuming and potentially error-prone, these issues are made all the more pertinent when working with a non-standardised chart of accounts.

With Joiin, no longer will you have the stress at month-end of trying to match your chart of accounts across your business units. Simply create a Joiin custom report template to homogenise your chart of accounts and use it month-on-month at the click of a button.

In the above video, you can look at how remapping works on our platform.

What is a chart of accounts?

A chart of accounts (COA) is an index of the financial accounts in a company’s general ledger, broken down into subcategories to provide insight into a company’s finances.

Example of a chart of accounts in Joiin

Often subsidiary companies contained within the same group have variations in their COA or are completely independent from one another, which can be down to a host of reasons such as a new company being enveloped into a group.

These differences can make producing consolidated reports difficult. Trying to match accounts and their values across companies for potentially thousands of transactions or painstakingly trying to standardise your general ledger one company at a time in your cloud accounting software, be it Xero, Quickbooks or Sage.

This is where Joiin’s custom reporting comes in.

A closer look at COA remapping in Joiin

So if you’re asking yourself, how can I re-map my chart of accounts across a multi-entity business or for accountancy firm clients with complex group structures? Here’s how it works in Joiin:

Joiin enables you to seamlessly remap your entire chart of accounts ready for automated consolidated financial reporting, working with data from your cloud software such as Xero, QuickBooks or Sage.

Within Joiin’s custom reporting you can create account groups that can manually map your GL codes across all your businesses, from your mismatched chart of accounts into one uniform ledger.

Once created, reports within Joiin can then be run month-on-month at the click of a button.

Top tip:

Joiin is great for producing consolidated reports and remapping your chart of accounts within our app, but did you know you can use Joiin as a tool to help you remap your chart of accounts in your source software (whether that’s Xero, QuickBooks or Sage)?

Example of reclassifying items in your chart of accounts

Joiin holds the information for every account within each of your entities from your source software, Xero, QuickBooks or Sage. Using our Chart of Accounts list you can easily see which accounts have variations between entities.

You can see from the above image that Abacus services classifies Postage and Freight differently from the rest of the group.

As a good housekeeping measure, you could go back to your cloud accounting software and reclassify any incorrect accounts, using Joiin as a guide.

Want to know more? Watch our on-demand demo, or register for a webinar where you will discover how to get the best out of Joiin.

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