Some of the things you need to think about and prepare before you start using the wizard to create your initial Rapidstart Forecast project. We also discuss some of the areas you should be aware of before starting.
What is the Common Chart of Accounts?
If you only have one entity, the Common Chart of Accounts (CCOA) can be the same as your entity's chart of accounts. If your company uses certain cloud based accounting systems, you can simply import the chart of accounts directly from those systems. Otherwise you need to get a comma delimited file with the relevant columns (see below). Most accounting systems allow you to export your chart of accounts details to a comma delimited format.
Also keep in mind the term Common Chart of Accounts refers to the consistent list of accounts you wish to use for your Budget and Forecast input and reporting. Whilst in many cases you may wish to include a full chart of accounts, it can be more practical to create a smaller less detailed chart of accounts. For example you may have 5 bank accounts in your accounts system, but realistically for budget and forecast projections you may just have 2 accounts, 1 for Trading Bank Account and all the others grouped together, say as Other Bank Accounts. You can set up a Common Chart of Accounts that consolidates multiple accounts into 1 account for forecasting perspectives.
Also keep in mind that if you have multiple entities they will likely have a different set of accounts in each entity, the Common Chart of Accounts is used across all the entities for standardisation. When you import the actuals for each entity the imported Trial Balance is simply mapped to your Common Chart of Accounts.
More information on using a Common Chart of AccountsIf you are using Xero, Quickbooks or MYOB, you can import the Chart of Accounts from your accounting system directly as your Common Chart of Accounts. As an alternative you can import your Common Chart of Accounts from a comma delimited file or CSV file exported from your accounts system or manually created and which must have the following data columns:
- Account Code - normally a numeric code for each account which may be grouped based on the accounts section (for example all accounts starting with '6' are Expenses accounts, starting with '4' are revenue accounts.
- Account Description - usually an alpha numeric description of the account
- Account Section - usually classified by your accounts system and basically specifies the section of the profit and loss or balance sheet the account belongs to. For example 'Revenue' refers to accounts related to revenues, 'Current Assets' refers to accounts that are current asset accounts in your balance sheet. (See below for more information)
You may have other columns in the CSV file, but you need at least these 3 columns.
Note that the column heading labels can be whatever you have in your CSV and will just require you to identify which columns are mapped to the import. For example, your column containing the account codes might be labelled in your CSV file as 'ACCODE', so when the import is set up you simply specify this column as the column containing the Account Code.
Other columns can be optionally added, such as 'Account Group' where an account belongs to a group of accounts within the same Account Section.
The column headings row can be whatever description you wish, but you need to know which column is the account code, which column is the account description and which column is the account section.
Account Section
The Account Section column is required to define which section the account belongs to in your profit and loss and balance sheet. Rapidstart provides the sections below, so when setting up you can specify which Account Sections in your CSV map to relevant sections in Rapidstart Forecast.
The Rapidstart Forecast sections provided are:
- Profit and Loss
- Revenue
- Direct Costs
- Expense
- Other Income
- Other Expense
- Balance Sheet
- Cash at Bank
- Current Assets
- Fixed Assets
- Non-Current Assets
- Current Liabilities
- Non-Current Liabilities
- Equity