Accounting Schemas and Default Accounts

In Compiere the accounts used for posting the accounting consequences of any document are defined as default accounts in the Accounting Schema.  A tenant may have multiple accounting schemata (one reason for this would be to have parallel accounting currencies).  This is to ensure that all necessary accounts are present and avoid any posting errors because required accounts are not provided.  It also means that  the person entering the document (e.g. Invoice) does not need to have any knowledge of how the accounting is done or at what level.

During Initial Tenant Setup the user provides the default accounts as a .csv file to the process.  The first (and therefore) primary Accounting Schema is created using these default accounts.  If all the default accounts are not provided then the Initial Tenant Setup process will fail.  The default accounts are then copied to the appropriate entities when a new entity record is created.  For example, when a new Business Partner Group is created the default accounts are copied for each Accounting Schema defined.  Then, when a new Business Partner is created, the default accounts are copied from the Business Partner Group selected for the Business Partner.  When a new Bank Account is created, the default accounts are copied from the Accounting schemata (as there is no intermediate entity like Business Partner Group).  For all entities with an 'Accounting' tab, records are never added to this tab.  The user can modify the default account values but cannot change the Accounting Schema. 

If a new Accounting Schema is created the general process is as follows:

1. Create New Accounting Schema
2. Define Elements
1. This may require creating a new account element and loading accounts if the same account element is not used.
3. Define GL and Default Accounts (note: if the same account element is used you can use the copy GL/Defaults  process button on the Account Schema tab.  This will copy the default accounts used in one schema to the new one)
4. Run the Add/Copy Accounts from the Defaults tab.  This will create a new record on the Accounting tab for all entities (including intermediate entities like Business Partner Group and Business Partner.
   

 
Some considerations:

1. If you run this process and select an existing accounting schema as opposed to the new one just created it will overwrite the existing values.  As users may change default accounts at any level (e.g. user may change the default asset account for a specific product category) this will have not desired consequences that the user must be aware of.  The most often changed default account is for Bank entities.
2. When you import account using the import file loader you have an option to update default accounts.  The update will only occur if the default accounts already exist.  Therefore if it is new account element, the default accounts must be added manually (there is currently an enhancement request for the file loader to do this).
3. The organization displayed in the default account is immaterial.  As default accounts are used only in documents and every document has an organization, the organization used for the accounting consequences  is always derived from the document.
4. Users never add new entities to an account tab, they can only update the default accounts.
5. Regardless of the Organization value of the entity (e.g. Product), the accounting tab displays * (shared).
6. Accounting schemata (other than the Primary) can be restricted to a specific Organization or group of Organizations.  However this has no effect on the set up and comes into consideration only during posting.