Accounts > About Accounts

About Accounts

Accounts are the heart of your business. Each time your company receives money or makes a payment, you have to track those earnings and expenses accurately- this is called 'keeping your books up-to-date".

Why do I need accounts?

Accounts are used to track the value of all your company's transactions: earnings from sales, purchases or payroll, bank account transfers. At any time, you can look up an account to check an account's balance by looking it up on the Chart of Accounts. The Chart of Accounts functions like an index for a book; it is a list of all your company accounts in numerical order. Organized into logical groups, each time you enter transactions, they automatically calculate and update the value of your assets (what you own), revenues (what you earn), liabilities (what you owe), expenses (what you buy), and ensure you can generate an accurate report on equity (your company's current value after paying off what you owe). Each group of accounts is then organized by type.

Which accounts do I need?

It is important to set up your accounts accurately before you begin working in Sage 50 Accounting to ensure you can generate the reports required to evaluate your business performance. To help you with this, the Sage 50 Accounting New Company Setup Wizard can add most of the accounts you need based on your business type. - it's quick, accurate, and can be modified easily.

Sage 50 Accounting also comes with a predefined set of accounts for many different types of companies. Adapting one of these "company templates" is much easier and faster than starting from scratch and typing in all your accounts one at a time.

After setting up a company template of accounts, you may want to add some new accounts, change or rename others, or remove the ones you're not using. You can add accounts at any time, and can usually change or remove them.

Use linked accounts to automatically assign amounts to specific accounts whenever you process a transaction.

Set up departments for sections of your company that you want to examine individually. (Sage 50 Premium Accounting)

Account Number Length and Ranges (Sage 50 Premium Accounting)

Account numbers are assigned automatically when you select an industry and company type to create your company. You can renumber individual accounts within each range and change the range of an account type. Account numbers have four digits initially, but you can expand this to a maximum of eight if you want to match a pre-existing account structure, or if you need more accounts.