A Simple Chart of Accounts Template for Small Businesses
Your chart of accounts is the list of categories every transaction gets sorted into — income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and equity. A bloated chart of accounts is one of the most common causes of confusing financial reports.
Start broader than you think you need
It's tempting to create a category for every possible expense. Resist it. A handful of broad, clear categories — Software, Marketing, Contractors, Office Supplies — will tell you more at a glance than forty narrow ones that fragment your spending.
Match categories to how you make decisions
Structure your chart of accounts around the questions you actually ask about your business, not around how a template says to organize it. If you want to know your total marketing spend at a glance, don't split it into five sub-categories no one reviews.
A clean chart of accounts, set up once and maintained consistently, is what makes monthly reports genuinely useful instead of just technically accurate.
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