RE: Setting up new COA for our business in Dynamic 365 Business Central
As far as I can understand the XX.XX.XXXX coding will be the value in the "No" column of your BC COA. You can follow these recommendations:
1. Make it numeric, not alphanumeric. BC allows you to have a alphanumeric value however it'll be a hard time for you to sort your accounts in ascending/descending if they are alphanumeric
2. I'd suggest get rid of the period (dots) between XX.XX.XXXX and form a number XXXXXX up straight. It will be so much easier for you while you're doing reporting out of COA. Plus you can accommodate some other characters in place of these dots, remember the limit of this field is 20 characters. I understand if you say it will be hard to read, but trust me, it's just a matter of a couple of days for you to get used to it. If you type in 201010 or 20.10.10 in a search it will bring up 201010 only so in essence you're still using the same numbers w/o period (dots) in between. You know the first 2 digits represent legal entity, second field represents GL String, etc. which should be enough. Business Central stores your COA per company, meaning Company A's COA is not visible in Company B
As a suggestion we often give to our customers: if you want to check if a certain practice of coding/describing your G/L accounts is suitable in BC, have a look at your BC database's Cronus Company. It is a demo company packaged by MS to give you a look and feel of how to operate BC. Have a look at that COA and compare it with yours. Apart from additional accounts (which your company may need) get rid of anything which does not match (Example: Cronus also follows coding of GL, without the dots in between)
Also, I would request you to consider Dimensions in BC. It may save you a lot of work to segment your codes, see if it helps