Chart of Accounts Overview

Chart of Accounts (CoA) is used to record transactions in a company’s general ledger.  As part of the accounting cycle, the CoA is used in the journaling process (i.e., performing journal entries) and also serves as the title for each ledger.  In general, all accounts are filed under one of five categories:  assets, liabilities, owner's equity, revenue and expenses.

 

Each company will have its own CoA numbering system and can assign a number for identification purposes.  A block of numbers can be assigned to one of those five categories and then be further divided into sub-categories. Gaps can be left between sub-category listings to allow for the addition of new accounts.

 

Chart of Accounts numberic list of accounts

 

Note:  OIPA is not an accounting system but can be interfaced using File Editor in the Rules Palette.  Common practice is to hold CoA information and then run a cycle to interface with a general ledger system.  Then you set-up another cycle that retrieves a list of all the accounting details to send to a middleware.  Lastly, you roll up a summary file to give to a general ledger system.

 

Chart of Accounts in OIPA

CoA is set-up at the company level in OIPA.  When a financial transaction or suspense transaction is processed and a CoA record(s) is present, an accounting record is written that associates an account with each piece of money that is involved with the transaction.  The accounting records are generated when an activity is processed/reversed or when the suspense record is added/deleted.

 

Accounting records are stored in the AsAccountingDetail and AsAccountingDetailField tables.  The AsAccountingDetail table stores the information for debit and credit amounts, which resulted from an activity or suspense transaction.  It also stores additional information for account number, processing, reversing, gain/loss, dates and any information needed to initiate activity/suspense.  If configured, additional information may be captured according to the client requirements in the AsAccountingDetailField table.  Refer to the Chart of Accounts Relationship Diagram for more information on CoA database tables.  

 

Account to Transaction Relationship

An account can be associated with one or more financial transactions and/or suspense actions.  This is a one-to-many relationship:  account to transactions.

 

Example:

Account 1001 is used when receiving a premium that is a new money type from two different transactions:

  1. InitialPremium transaction

  2. AdditionalPayment transaction

 

Transaction to Account Relationship

In CoA, an account is higher then a transaction in the hierarchy because you associate transactions to accounts.  It may be helpful from a set-up context to understand that a transaction can have one or more accounts associated with it depending on the types of monies that are accounted for in the transaction.  This is a one-to-many relationship:  transaction to accounts.  

 

Example:

A disbursement transaction can have two different accounts associated with it:

  1. Account 9001 for a Variable Annuity plan

  2. Account 9002 for a Variable Payout plan

 

Note: Transactions are associated with accounts at the entry level, which is below the account level in the hierarchy.  The transaction view at the top of the CoA screen does not dictate the hierarchy levels.  

 

Account and Account Entry Details

An account can have one or more sets of account entry details written to the database.  Criteria can be configured to filter the correct account entry detail to use for accounting purposes as well as the correct account entry detail to write to the database.

 

Example:

 

 

Visual Diagram of CoA Flow

Below is a visual diagram of the CoA flow.  Start at the star and follow the red doted lines to see the order the system follows.  The black solid lines denote important relationships between tables that create CoA records.

 

Diagram of CoA flow