I agree that it’s quite difficult to get an official source for a Chart of Accounts in some countries.
I’m now trying to setup a Chart of Accounts for our tax-exempt association in The Netherlands. Which basically meant starting over from scratch and looking at how the minimal chart is setup.
Setting up the Journal types and assigning Journals to them starts out quite easy. But gets tricky when configuring the Equity (“Eigen Vermogen” in Dutch) on the Balance and defining the actual Profit or Loss on the P+L report. As discussed here: Balance sheet... doesn't balance
This is doable because I learned some accounting in secondary school. But teaching everything to the treasury control committee each shows that it’s not easy.
I will describe the situation I see for The Netherlands below.
In The Netherlands we use at least 3 different Charts of accounts:
System Bakker and derivatives. Ancient system using flat CoA with somewhat standard numbers and names, used by small businesses (and our association).
NL GAAP: Used by SME’s and larger companies that are required to submit year reports electronically via XBLR.
IFRS: Used by European medium and larger companies that are required to submit year reports electronically via XBLR.
Which means that for The Netherlands, Tryton would need to support NL GAAP + XBLR and/or the traditional system to gain more popularity. Since The Netherlands has a lot of Self-employed companies and other SME’s, supporting the traditional System Bakker looks like the most obvious choice. But there’s no official standard for that. Most accountants still base it on the structure devised in 1927, but then add their own flavour.
I think setting up my own repo and trying to create a module for that would be the only option for now.
Official source does not mean necessary the government source.
An official source may be any kind of structure but we need to be sure it is sustainable in the long term. So the source maintain a published CoA and it is useful to many.
OK. I understand it doesn’t have to be a government source.
Having an official source for a Chart of Accounts that’s maintained would be very nice. I will get back on this when I find one.
After some searching, it seems that the Dutch RGS (Referentie GrootboekSchema) does publish a reference Chart of Accounts. Which is part of SBR (Standard business Reporting) initiative that all somewhat larger companies need to use.
Implementing the RGS is on my todo list for a looong time, but I’m lacking the deep knowledge of the Dutch financial system to make it work properly, so I depend on someone else for that and that’s where time pops in, we need both time to implement this.
Most (if not all) the accounting software in the Netherlands use their own CoA and then reference it to the RGS so reporting becomes a bit more easy. Also communicating with the different agencies and government requires this.
You can scroll through the different presentations and see that there are different types of implementations possible. The whole set of accounts is based on XBRL and IFRS but with their own sauce.
My idea for Tryton is to directly implement and use the RGS as CoA. The wizard when importing the CoA will guide you through the process of selecting the right set of accounts. The rest of the accounts will be also imported but disabled so the user can enable them in the future when needed. In the xlsx file you can kind of do the same with the filters available.
That’s not completely true, each company is allowed to use their own CoA, but for reporting and communicating the RGS is becoming the only way.
Thank you for your response. That sounds like a good idea. Then it should be possible as a self-employed company and then scale to something bigger. But also start the Tryton implementation as a big company.
I hope we will get something of the ground in the future.
