Hello,
first of all, a big thank for your fantastic work. I was wondering if there is any way to modify the chart of accounts using the API? I have not seen it in your documentation.
thanks a lot!
Julien
Hi Julien,
Thanks for coming back to us.
We use to allow users modify the chart of accounts, but most assumed it was a way to just organise costs (projects etc). This caused problems for us, as you know we automate accounts so in ‘a’ process we’ll look sometimes for a specific chart of accounts to be there, and if they’re not then the process failed.
So the short answer is no.
What were your reasons?
Pete
Hi Julian,
The Chart of Accounts has been added to the API documents now.
Thanks Pete
thanks for the prompt reply. I completely understand the reasoning.
I was asking this because I provide a PoS software for small currency exchange businesses and along the way, I have had customers asking for a bookkeeping solution as well. So in terms of accounting, the singularity would just be to integrate in the books the foreign currency stock changes (i.e. transactions of buy or sell) so the Money Changer can easily gets a P&L, BS or GL of his operations with some details specific to his businesses. It would be posting on a per-transaction or batch per day the exchange transaction in sub accounts
Another reason why I wanted to modify the chart was to simplify it for smaller businesses who are often one man shows and do not need a complex bookkeeping structure.
But i am definitely not an expert in accounting and in your platform so you may think of an easier what to do so.
Would be glad to take this further through email if it does not make sense to post it here.
thanks. Julien
We've a couple of POS services looking to integrate in with Bullet.
Let me forward this onto my co-founder. He's the CTO and see can he give you a better answer back.
Where are you based?
Pete
I am in Singapore. I look forward to hearing from you guys.
Best regards,
Many of the accounts that are in the chart of accounts are used by the system - we create all the double entries in the background, so we expect certain accounts to exist, which is why there's some restrictions around them. There's no reason we couldn't add an API for the chart of accounts, but we will probably send back an error if an attempt is made to delete a "system" entry in the chart of accounts.
John.
It is definitely something I would love to have and I suspect anyone building vertical apps for a specific clientele looking at integrating with Bullet would find useful too as we could minimize the account chart complexity to its minimum required size.
But as importantly, as you said, it is important that you prevent users to break the system required accounts so your suggestion of limiting deletion on some accounts makes total sense.
Please let me know if and when this becomes available and we will definitely try it.
julien