How to impress your accountant

Even though we are trying to keep accounting jargon to a minimum, it is a good idea to be on talking terms with your accountant! And, in order to talk to the accountants, you need to speak their lingo, right? Oh no, not all of it, just enough to get across what you want to get done. So, it is good to know that whatever GnuCash calls the 'account hierarchy', the Accountants call the 'Chart of Accounts'.

If your accountant has GnuCash, you can send a copy of the MACS file that we created earlier. They can open this in their GnuCash application and review.

Tip

What if your accountant doesn't have GnuCash?

You can still send it in one of the popular spreadsheet formats such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc. How will you do that? Go to the Reports menu and select Account Summary. You should now see the complete hierarchy of accounts that we created in a tabular report format. You can copy and paste this into Microsoft Excel and save it as an Excel file. Alternatively, you can paste this into OpenOffice.org Calc and save it as a Calc ODS file. Accountants are typically very heavy users of spreadsheets and, chances are, your accountant should be able to handle one of these.

Here comes the MOST IMPORTANT part. In the e-mail, just say casually, "Here is the draft chart of accounts that I created. When you have a minute, take a quick peek and let me know what you think". That ought to do it.