Chart of accounts

The chart of accounts lists all the company’s accounts: both Balance sheet accounts and P&L accounts. Every transaction is recorded by debiting and crediting multiple accounts in a journal entry. In a way, a chart of accounts is like a company’s DNA!

Every account listed in the chart of accounts belongs to a specific category. In BridgeERP, each account has a unique code and belongs to one of these categories:

• Equity and subordinated debts

  • Equity is the amount of money invested by a company’s shareholders to finance the company’s activities.

  • Subordinated debts are the amount of money lent by a third party to a company to finance its activities. In the event of the dissolution of a company, these third parties are reimbursed before the shareholders.

• Fixed assets are tangible (i.e., physical) items or properties that a company purchases and uses to produce its goods and services. Fixed assets are long-term assets. This means the assets have a useful life of more than one year. They also include properties, plants, and equipments (also known as “PP&E”) and are recorded on the balance sheet with that classification.

• Current assets and liabilities

  • The current assets account is a balance sheet line item listed under the Assets section, which accounts for all company-owned assets that can be converted to cash within one year. Current assets include cash, cash equivalents, accounts receivable, stock inventory, marketable securities, prepaid liabilities, and other liquid assets.

  • Current liabilities are a company’s short-term financial obligations due within one year. An example of a current liability is money owed to suppliers in the form of accounts payable.

• Bank and cash accounts

  • A bank account is a financial account maintained by a bank or other financial institution in which the financial transactions between the bank and a customer are recorded.

  • A cash account, or cash book, may refer to a ledger in which all cash transactions are recorded. The cash account includes both the cash receipts and the cash payment journals.

• Expenses and income

  • An expense is the costs of operations a company bears to generate revenues. It is simply defined as the cost one is required to spend on obtaining something. Common expenses include supplier payments, employee wages, factory leases, and equipment depreciation.

  • The term “income” generally refers to the amount of money, property, and other transfers of value received over a set period of time in exchange for services or products.

Journal entries

Every financial document of the company (e.g., an invoice, a bank statement, a pay slip, a capital increase contract) is recorded as a journal entry, impacting several accounts.

For a journal entry to be balanced, the sum of all its debits must be equal to the sum of all its credits.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the process of linking journal items of a specific account and matching credits and debits.

Its primary purpose is to link payments to their related invoices to mark them as paid. This is done by doing a reconciliation on the accounts receivable account and/or the accounts payable account.

Reconciliation is performed automatically by the system when:

• the payment is registered directly on the invoice

• the links between the payments and the invoices are detected at the bank matching process

Bank Reconciliation

Bank reconciliation is the matching of bank statement lines (provided by your bank) with transactions recorded internally (payments to suppliers or from customers). For each line in a bank statement, it can be:

• matched with a previously recorded payment: a payment is registered when a check is received from a customer, then matched when checking the bank statement.

• recorded as a new payment: the payment’s journal entry is created and reconciled with the related invoice when processing the bank statement.

• recorded as another transaction: bank transfer, direct charge, etc.

BridgeERP should automatically reconcile most transactions; only a few should need manual review. When the bank reconciliation process is finished, the balance on the bank account in BridgeERP should match the bank statement’s balance.

Checks Handling

There are two approaches to managing checks and internal wire transfers:

• Two journal entries and a reconciliation

• One journal entry and a bank reconciliation