Wrapping up Chart-of-Accounts design on a 2026 R1 build (clean-slate migration off a legacy ERP whose chart had grown past 400 accounts) and would like outside eyes on the overall shape before we lock the sub-account segment layout — that part is effectively set-once (segments can be appended later but not removed, reordered, or shortened).
Company profile: single CAD legal entity, USD as a meaningful secondary transaction currency, ~15–20 ERP users, business mix of distribution + light assembly + full manufacturing across roughly 7–8 product families.
Chart: 55 GL accounts total (roughly 14 Asset / 9 Liability / 4 Equity / 2 Revenue / 10 COGS / 8 Operating Expense / 7 Other Income-Expense / 1 Income Tax). Design philosophy throughout: push repeatable detail into a sub-account dimension or the relevant sub-ledger module rather than adding GL accounts — e.g. Fixed Asset CCA classes live in the FA module per-asset rather than as separate GL lines; product-family detail on COGS/Revenue lives on sub-account.
Sub-account key: 2 segments x 3 characters, FUNCTION-DETAIL. FUNCTION = who earns/spends (Corporate & Finance / Manufacturing / Sales & Marketing / Admin-G&A / Warehouse & Distribution). DETAIL = within-account breakdown, mainly product family, with a handful of accounts carrying their own list (e.g. counterparty identity on the long-term-debt and shareholder-loan accounts).
Example: 50100 . MFG-PF1 = COGS for product family 1, incurred in Manufacturing. On the related-party side, 24100 . COR-L01 (loan principal) and 80200 . COR-L01 (interest expense) share the same DETAIL value for lender 1 — filtering sub-account *-L01 pulls the whole lender relationship across the balance sheet and P&L with no dedicated GL account per lender.
One open question we haven't closed: for a related-party financing balance (e.g. a shareholder loan) where the counterparty's identity matters for reporting, is it better practice to carry that as sub-account detail under a liability control account (as above), or as a vendor record? We've found documentation supporting both mechanically, but the vendor route seems to force a fabricated AP document for something that isn't a real trade payable, and either way the balance shows up in AP aging. Curious if anyone's built this before and which way they landed.
Questions for the group:
1. Does a 55-account chart at this scale sound in the right range, or does something read as under- or over-built?
2. Anything structurally we're likely to regret not having in the 2-segment layout before we lock it?
3. Any pattern for "loan-like" related-party liabilities that avoids both the AP-document workaround and the AP-aging pollution?
Happy to share more detail on any piece.