Finance setup is a separate project from the rest. Different owner, different decisions, and a dependency on your accountant rather than on anything configured elsewhere.
Do not let it block the other paths, and do not let the other paths rush it.
The order
1. Currency and financial year, which were set in General settings. Confirm before anything else.
2. Chart of accounts. See Chart of accounts.
3. Tax. See Tax.
4. Numbering, if not already done. See Invoice and employee numbering.
5. Account mappings. See GL mappings.
6. Opening balances. See Bringing your books in.
7. Approval thresholds. See Approval policies.
That order is not arbitrary. Each step depends on the one above, and mappings in particular cannot be done before the accounts they map to exist.
What breaks if this is skipped
Finance is the one path where an incomplete setup produces work that has to be redone rather than merely postponed.
Invoices raised under the wrong tax rate have to be credited and reissued. Entries posted before mappings exist sit unallocated and have to be journalled by hand. Opening balances entered mid-period have to be unpicked at the year end.
None of it is catastrophic and all of it is avoidable by taking the week.
Get your accountant in the room
The single most useful thing on this page.
The chart of accounts is theirs, not yours. They will file your accounts against it, and a structure invented by somebody else is one they will rebuild.
Tax rules are jurisdiction-specific and change. Guessing produces returns that are wrong in a way nobody notices for a quarter.
Opening balances have to agree with your last closed period. Only they know what that was.
An hour of their time at the start is worth several days later, and they would much rather give you the hour.
Who signs it off
Somebody has to say the finance configuration is correct, and it should not be whoever built it.
Usually your accountant, occasionally a finance director. Either way, get it in writing before the first real invoice, because the alternative is discovering at the year end that nobody actually agreed to any of it.
Chart of accounts
The structure everything financial is recorded against.
Start from the standard set and adjust. A chart built from nothing takes a week and ends up resembling the standard one anyway.
Fewer accounts than instinct suggests. Every account is a line in every report, and a report with two hundred lines is one nobody reads. Detail belongs in the transactions, not in the account structure.
Match what you already file under, if you are moving from an existing system. Continuity means last year's numbers and this year's can be compared.
Mappings
What turns an invoice or an expense into ledger entries automatically. See GL mappings.
This is the part that makes the accounting invisible. Set it once and ordinary operational work posts itself correctly, which is the entire argument for finance living in the same system as the work.
Check it with one of each. One invoice, one expense, one payment. Look at what posted. That is a ten-minute check that validates the whole configuration.
Tax
Set the rates before the first invoice. An invoice issued at the wrong rate has to be credited and reissued, and customers notice.
Cover the cases you actually have, including zero-rated and exempt if they apply to you. Both are commonly forgotten and both are wrong in a way that only surfaces at filing.
Opening balances
Where you were when you moved. See Bringing your books in.
Do it once, properly, at a period boundary. Mid-period opening balances are the hardest thing on this page to unpick.
Reconcile immediately after. If the opening trial balance does not agree, it will not agree in three months either, and by then there will be three months of transactions on top of the discrepancy.
Approval thresholds
Who can approve what, and above what amount. See Approval policies.
Set an amount that means something. A threshold low enough to catch everything makes approval a rubber stamp, which is worse than no approval because it looks like a control and is not.
Do not let finance block the rest
Finance setup takes a week and depends on somebody outside your organisation.
The rest of the platform works without it. Deals, conversations, projects and people are unaffected by an incomplete chart of accounts. Invoicing is the only thing that genuinely waits.
Run the other paths in parallel and let finance take the time it needs. The common failure is a whole rollout stalled for a fortnight waiting on an accountant to return from leave.
Budgets
Optional and worth doing once the ledger is real. See Budgets. Note that budgets follow your financial year, which is the other reason to have that right.
Do it at a period boundary
Every part of this is easier at the start of a month, quarter or year. Mid-period migrations are possible and every one of them costs an extra day of reconciliation.
What you can defer
Not all of finance has to be ready at once.
Deferrable: budgets, recurring invoices, detailed cost centres. All can be added once the ledger is running.
Not deferrable: currency, financial year, tax rates and numbering. Every one of those is either impossible or painful to change after transactions exist, and all four take an afternoon.
Getting the four right and deferring the rest is a good week's work rather than a stalled month.
Checking it worked
Raise a test invoice, pay it, and look at the ledger. Numbering, tax, currency, branding and the posting are all exercised in one flow.
Then reverse it, so the test does not live in your books.
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