Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

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Have a client that wants to use alpha characters in their GL chart of accounts. Does anyone have reasons why we shouldn't use alpha characters?

Sample accounts:

001-400000-00-00

001-400000-LE-00

001-400000-LE-FL

001-400000-LE-GA

001-400000-ST-00

001-400000-ST-FL

001-400000-ST-GA

001-400000-ST-TX

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks,

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Tim Foster 8,515 on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

Usually the letters are meaningful or an abbreviation of something. When those things change, you will be getting asked to fix it. Consider an expense account for "Steve Richards" - SR in your GL. What happens when Steve retires and "Don Mahoney" takes over? Like any key field in GP, these things can be hard to change. There is Professional Services Tools Library (PSTL) Account Changer, but there is always a risk to your data (perhaps small).

On the other hand, some of our companies use alpha characters in GL without any issues at all. In your example, I'm pretty sure TX or GA will mean the same thing it does today (and forever)

Tim.

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Ian Grieve 22,784 on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

A large number of my clients have alpha characters in the chart of accounts and haven't encountered any issues.

Typically they have been used to represent business roles, regions or other locations.

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Ian Grieve 22,784 on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

A large number of my clients have alpha characters in the chart of accounts and haven't encountered any issues.

Typically they have been used to represent business roles, regions or other locations.

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Richard Wheeler 75,848 Moderator on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

You can go to Tools->Setup->Company->Account Format and set the Expansion Setting to accomodate the letters you want to use. You do this so the letters do not get cut off. The only issue I have seen here is if there is a mix of letters and numbers. Oft times you get a lot of blank space or if you have a long account number it gets cut off.

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Mahmoud Saadi 32,738 on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

There is absolutely no business logic problem with considering alpha characters in chart of account. Although, you need to be quite aware when it comes to non-alphanumeric characters.

The post below shows further illustrations on this issue, to be considered: Any problems with non-alphanumeric Characters

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Richard Whaley 25,195 on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

On the PSTL tool to change account numbers in the future, it works. Just get our book :) and make a backup first.

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Imad Kassoumah 3,235 on at

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RE: Alpha characters in GL chart of accounts?

Hi,

Can you figure the reason why the client wants to use number and characters. May be the use of Multidimension feature solve this reason. Typing numbers and characters in the account number is tedious for the user.

Imad Kassoumah

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