0004 Chart of accounts

Version 0.1, draft. Implemented in the reference library (Chart, ChartTranslation, Balances, Names).

librotenado has one harmonised chart of accounts. National charts – prescribed ones such as France’s Plan comptable général and common ones such as Germany’s standard charts – are translations of it. Where a national chart distinguishes more finely than the harmonised one, the harmonised chart grows; a translation never bends.

Accounts

An account is an object of type account (part 0003):

Assets and expenses normally have a debit balance, liabilities, equity and income a credit balance (part 0001: debit positive). Memo accounts stand outside the balance sheet and the result – commitments given and received, the opening and closing balance sheet – and have no normal side.

Names are not part of an account, as they differ by language: translation data names an account by its id. The identity carries no meaning – no path, no name – so moving an account in the hierarchy or renaming it changes nothing that refers to it. Accounts that a set of books opens itself – each bank account, each customer – refine accounts of the chart (part 0002).

Charts

A chart is an object of type chart with name, version and accounts. A chart MUST satisfy:

• every id occurs once;
• every parent is an account of the chart, of the same kind;
• no account refines itself, directly or through others.

An account inherits the attributes of the accounts it refines; its own values take precedence.

Translations of national charts

A translation is an object of type chart_translation:

• A translation is unambiguous by construction: each national account maps onto exactly one harmonised account.
• Every harmonised account it names MUST exist in the chart it translates into.
• It is reversible for a harmonised account onto which exactly one national account maps. Where several national accounts map onto the same harmonised account, the harmonised chart is coarser than the national one: the model has to grow before that national chart is complete. Implementations report such accounts.

Translations are versioned together with the national chart and tested with published cases per country (OPEN: which charts may be published, see the whitepaper).

The chart of version 0.1

The harmonised chart of version 0.1 is published as spec/data/chart.json, with names in English and French. It is built against its first national chart, the French Plan comptable général in its version of 1 January 2026 (Autorité des normes comptables, PCG, articles 1121-1 and 1231-80 to 1231-89):

• Six roots, one per kind: assets, liabilities, equity, income, expenses, memo accounts.
• One harmonised account for every account of the PCG – 851, classes 1 to 8 – refining the harmonised account of its national parent. The translation fr-pcg is therefore reversible everywhere.
• Groups of mixed kind are split. Where a national group holds accounts of different kinds – suppliers (40, a liability) and suppliers with debit balances (409, an asset), or the VAT accounts of 445 – the accounts of the other kind refine a harmonised group of their own, under the root of their kind: 20 such groups.
• Contra accounts – depreciation and impairment, rebates obtained or granted – keep the kind of what they correct and have the opposite balance.

Each further national chart is translated against this chart, and the chart grows where it distinguishes more finely. The English names are the project’s translation.

The German balance sheet (HGB § 266, part 0009) already distinguishes more finely than the PCG: shares, receivables, payables and current securities of affiliated companies and of companies linked by participating interests, and the reserve for shares in a controlling company. The chart 0.1 has seven accounts for them, refining the PCG accounts 261, 411, 401, 503 and 106; they have no account of the PCG of their own.

Balances

The balance of an account, for one owner in one currency on a date, is the sum of the base_units of the postings of that owner on that account in that currency, in all bookings – recorded and reversing – dated on or before that date (part 0001). A positive balance is a debit balance, a negative one a credit balance. Over all accounts of one owner in one currency, the balances sum to zero.

In the hierarchy, the balance of an account includes the accounts that refine it – of the chart and opened in the books (part 0002): the balance of office expenses includes that of software. Balances rolled up this way over all accounts are the trial balance, from which reports are derived.

Open points

• Further national charts, starting with Germany’s standard charts – whether a translation of them may be published.
• The accounts of the PCG as a template rather than a harmonisation: grouping them by concept across countries (statement items, tax treatment) once a second chart shows where they meet.
• The PCG lists its suspense accounts as a range, “471 à 473”; the translation maps 471 only.
• The kind of accounts the PCG lets run either way – group and partners’ current accounts (451, 455), suspense accounts (471) – follows their usual side.
• The conditions for reusing the text of the PCG, which the French names follow.
• Attributes: a registry of attribute names and values (tax treatment, sphere, …).