How to maintain a chart of accounts

HOW TO MAINTAIN A CHART OF ACCOUNTS?

Chart of Accounts:

           “ System of accounting records developed by every organization to be compatible with its particular financial structure, and in agreement with the amount of detail required in its financial statements. It consists of a list of ledger account names and numbers showing classifications and sub-classifications, and serves as an index to locate a given account within the ledger.”

Why we want to maintain a chart of account?

Setting up a chart of accounts is one of the first, if not the first, task you perform when setting up an accounting system whether a manual or computerized system.

A business needs and should want to know where the money is coming from and where it is going. Your chart of accounts is a tool for gathering and organizing this type of information.
A business must have useful information in order to be able to survive in today's competitive business world. You notice that I said information - raw data is not very useful until it has been "massaged" and summarized into meaningful information. Your accounting system should be designed and used to provide much of this detailed, summarized, and needed information. The information available for your financial reports (summary and/or detailed) often depends on how well you designed your chart of accounts.
Modifying Chart of Accounts:
To maintain the chart of accounts we go through the following process.
We have opened the Peach tree software where we have already created the company. The very first window which was opened was:

The chart of accounts will maintain automatically in software when you create a company.

We have selected the option “open existing company”. Then we pressed the browse button. Then we have selected the drive where our company is located. We have selected the Z drive, and opened our company. The following window was appear:

From this window we have selected the “maintain” option from the toolbar:

After selecting that we have selected the option out of all “chart of accounts”.

The list of chart of accounts were appear:

Now we want to delete the any account id from the list of accounts. Let assume you want to delete the petty cash accounts you will type the account id or search it by pressing the “search” option.

After selecting that we will select the delete option from toolbar and delete this account.

And if you want to change the id we will select the option “change id” from tool bar.

After selecting that the following screen will appear:

The red circled image you can see above would appear. And here you will add your new account id.

HOW TO ADD BEGGING G BALANCE

First create a new company as you do before. Then by giving information of CHARTS OF ACCOUNTS, create charts of account.

Go in option maintain then click charts of accounts.

Then by giving information save one by one charts of accounts.

Then how to add beginning balance:

When you open charts of accounts through maintain option it will appear like:

At the rite side of charts of accounts there is an option of “BEGINNING BALANCE”. Click it will appear:

If giving information of charts of accounts is given like
as on 1^st January 2012, then you must chose the starting and ending month of last year.

By choosing the rite option of year, press OK.

It will appear you this chart. By adding all values given in charts of account and if the balance is equal then press OK at the left side the top.

This is how you entered the beginning balances.