Chart of Accounts Table

The chart of accounts lists all the accounts used in a company’s financial transactions. In the Xtreme.mdb database, this table is called “Account”. In addition to listing the account number and name, it also has fields that link to the other account related tables (type and class) and the balance to date. The MS Financial database uses the table “frl_account_code”. It has fields for specifying whether its normal balance is a debit or credit, whether it is active, and the last date it was used.

The Quickbooks database stores its chart of accounts in a table called “Account”. It has fields for storing the full account name, checking whether the account is currently active, its total balance, and tax information. Interestingly enough, it also has a field called “Account Type”. This is the data that we couldn’t locate in the previous section. It appears that rather than store this information in a separate table, the account type is listed with each record. From a database modeling standpoint, this is actually a poor design decision and not at all standard. It is much more efficient to have a small table that lists the account types and then link them to this table. But at least we now know where the account type information is and this will make reporting much easier.

Another interesting aspect of QuickBooks is that account numbers are not required. There is an option in the QuickBooks application that lets you enable or disable the use of account numbers. We learned earlier that a benefit of having account numbers is that it orders accounts on the basis of liquidity. QuickBooks’ financial reports list accounts alphabetically. Liquidity has no relevance. Again, we see that QuickBooks is designed for small businesses because this would not be acceptable for a large corporation.