Chart of Accounts

A category says what money was spent on — "snacks", "transport", "training material". A statement heading says where that belongs in a Profit & Loss.

Without headings a P&L can only print a flat list of whatever names people typed, in no particular order, with no subtotals and no cost of sales. That is the difference between a report you can read yourself and one an accountant, lender or grant officer will accept.

The headings

Deliberately few. A trading business needs the headings a lender or tax agent expects, not a four-hundred-line chart.

Money in	Money out
Revenue	Cost of Sales
Other Income	Personnel Costs
	Premises & Utilities
	Selling & Marketing
	Administrative Expenses
	Finance Costs
	Taxes
	Other Expenses

Cost of Sales matters more than the rest. It is what makes a gross profit possible: revenue minus the direct cost of what you sold. Until at least one account is marked Cost of Sales, SBB shows no gross profit at all — because revenue minus nothing is not a gross profit any more than revenue minus everything is.

What SBB already did for you

When this feature arrived, SBB read every existing category and filed the ones whose meaning was clear — salaries to Personnel, rent and electricity to Premises, bank charges to Finance Costs.

It deliberately left the rest alone. "Snacks" is cost of sales in a bar and staff welfare in an office, and no rule can tell which from the word. Those show as Unclassified for someone who knows the business to settle.

A wrong heading is worse than a missing one: a missing one looks like a question, a wrong one looks like an answer.

New businesses start with headings already set, plus the direct costs their trade actually has — food and drink purchases for a bar, raw materials and direct labour for a manufacturer, programme costs for a nonprofit.

1. File what is unclassified

The quickest place is the report itself, because that is where you notice it.

1. Open Reports, then the P&L tab.
2. If anything is unfiled, a banner says how many accounts and what they are worth.
3. Select File them all to work through them largest first, or use the File it control on any single line.

Each choice saves on its own. A half-finished pass is still progress.

2. Move something already filed

Sometimes an account is filed, just filed wrongly.

1. On the P&L tab, select Adjust accounts.
2. Every account now shows its heading, not only the unfiled ones.
3. Select Move on any line and pick a different heading.

The statement redraws as you go. Select Done adjusting when finished.

3. Or manage the whole chart at once

1. Open Settings.
2. Find Transaction categories.
3. Each category shows its statement heading; change any of them there.

Unclassified categories are marked in amber, since that is the one state that needs a person.

Lines that cannot be filed

Occasionally the P&L shows an unclassified amount with no File it control. That means there is no category record behind it — either a journal posting made straight to the ledger, or a category that has since been removed while transactions still refer to it.

Those cannot be fixed from the report. Recategorise the underlying entries in Transactions and they will move.

Sub-accounts

A category can sit under a parent category, and the P&L will show it indented beneath its parent with a subtotal. That is separate from the statement heading: the heading decides which section it prints in, the parent decides how it is grouped within that section.

Most businesses need neither more than one level nor a heading on every leaf. Start with headings; add parents only where the detail earns it.

Not the same as Classes

These get confused constantly, and picking the wrong one produces a chart of accounts that multiplies every category by every branch.

	Statement heading	Class
Answers	What kind of cost is this?	Which part of the business?
Example	Cost of Sales	Skills for Change grant
Lives on	the category	each transaction

If you want to compare branches, projects or grants, use Classes — not more categories.

Related

• Reports & Explorer — the statements these headings build
• Reporting Classes — the other way to slice the same money