Smart comments for accounts

For each account, you can set some comments that could help to understand how to use it or to find some extra information.

The format of the comment is free, so you can just type what you need. But, to stay organized, it is better to use some keywords to express special meanings (keywords are at the beginning of the line, prefixed with a '@' symbol).

In some of our system-provided firms, we used these keywords for ordinary accounts:

• @aka, which stands for "also known as", for accounts that could have given other names in other chart of accounts, but with the same meaning;
• @href, for URLs of web sites that explain the meaning of the account or provide examples on how to use it;
• @example, to provide an example of a situation where the account could be used, or to better explain the meaning;
• @meaning, to express the meaning of the account in a short sentence;
• @see, when we want to point to another related account (mainly to consider the difference);
• @check, when we are not sure of the name or of other information (help us to improve the chart of accounts if you can answer our doubts).

When you choose an account using the tree view window, you can check whether the meaning of the account is correct for the transaction you are recording:

Also, when you look at the ledger page of a single account, the comments are shown, so you can better evaluate if you did the correct job:

Some kewyords, if used, are specially interpreted by the application. For instance, @href makes the text afterwards a link, as you might have noticed.

Keywords and comments play a special role in the Financial Statement Configuration, where instead of accounts we have items that keep accounts organized and let us fine-tune how the Financial Statement gets prepared.

In a previous post we discussed the use of the following keywords:

• @caption, to specify the description that is shown after the title of the statement;
• @strip, to tell the application which part of the description of the journal entries has to be stripped away when analyzing accounts (for the Statement of Changes in Equity);
• @analyze, to tell the application which accounts have to be analyzed.

Here, we introduce a new one:

• @closing, that you might want to set to "no" if you don't want for the related accounts to be proposed a closing entry.

Other keywords for our smart comments could be introduced in the future. Meanwhile, you can safely play with the above ones.