If your Rapidstart Forecast involves multiple entities, or you have one entity but the chart of accounts is too detailed for your forecasting and reporting purposes, you may want to consider utilising a Common Chart of Accounts for this purpose.
A Common Chart of Accounts (CCA) represents the chart of accounts to be used for all entities in the consolidation/forecasting approach. This approach allows you to handle a situation where each entity's chart of accounts is different as well as providing the facility to aggregate unnecessary levels of detail.
For example entity A might have an ANZ account labelled "101 ANZ Bank" and an additional account labelled "103 Macquarie Bank", whilst entity B might have an NAB account labelled "101 NAB Bank". Of course we could set up the accounts in the CCA as "101 ANZ Bank", "102 NAB Bank" and "103 Macquarie Bank", but the problem is we could end up with a large number of potentially unnecessary duplicated accounts.
As a better option, we may define the accounts in the CCA as "101 Trading Bank 1" and "102 Trading Bank 2", then when we import the trial balance for each entity we define the mapping so that the entity accounts get mapped to the relevant CCA accounts, so "101 ANZ Bank" goes to "101 Trading Bank 1", "103 Macquarie Bank" goes to "102 Trading Bank 2" and "101 NAB Bank" goes to "101 Trading Bank 1".
Of course another option is to simply define a single account in the CCA as "101 Trading Bank 1" and then map "101 ANZ Bank", "101 NAB Bank" and "103 Macquarie Bank" all to "101 Trading Bank 1". In this case for entity A both bank accounts will be aggregated to "101 Trading Bank 1" and for entity B the one account will be loaded into "101 Trading Bank 1" and for the consolidated group "101 Trading Bank 1" will represent the consolidation of all bank accounts.
This method can also be applied to any of the accounts, so for example Entity A might have the following accounts:
621 Pens & Pencils
622 Printing Paper
623 Copying Paper
624 Staples
whilst Entity B might have the following accounts:
621 Office Stationery
622 Other Stationery
From a budget/forecast/reporting perspective we are not interested in breaking everything down to this level of detail. In the CCA we can create a single account "621 Stationery" and simply map all the accounts to this account. When the TB data is imported, all the data will be mapped and aggregated as necessary.
Apart from providing the ability to map data from different accounting systems used by each entity, it also enables you to both standardise and summarise the accounts structure for planning and reporting purposes. There are many situations where companies have extremely long charts of accounts which are not relevant at a management reporting level, so using a CCA provides a rapid facility to deal with this.