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Chart of Accounts

Zuora

Chart of Accounts

Overview

Zuora's chart of accounts contains the accounting codes used to categorize your Zuora transactions for accounting purposes. In accounting terms, these codes identify the account affected by a transaction, such as Accounts Receivable or Cash. Many of our customers simply use their GL account names for Zuora accounting codes.

After the FX Gain and Loss for GL entries is set to Yes in accounting rules, the following GL will be added as system accounting codes:

  • Unrealized FX Gain (type: Other Equity)
  • Unrealized FX Loss (type: Other Liabilities)
  • Realized FX Gain  (type: Other Equity)
  • Realized FX Loss (type: Other Liabilities)

The new accounting codes will automatically be applied to the accounting codes setting, and you can edit them later. For more information, see Edit an Accounting Code.

Zuora as a Revenue Sub-ledger

You can use Zuora as a simple revenue sub-ledger, or Zuora Finance as a more full-featured revenue sub-ledger.  Either way, every financial transaction in Zuora must be associated with an accounting code that maps to the GL account affected by the transaction. The transactions which require an accounting code are:

  • invoices
  • invoice adjustments: Note that the invoice adjustment transaction is deprecated on Production. Zuora recommends that you use the Invoice Item Adjustment transaction instead.
  • invoice item adjustments
  • credit balance adjustments
  • payments (and credit balance payments)
  • refunds (and credit balance refunds)

The following transaction types are only available if you enable the Invoice Settlement feature.

The Invoice Settlement feature is generally available as of Zuora Billing Release 296 (March 2021). This feature includes Unapplied Payments, Credit and Debit Memos, and Invoice Item Settlement. If you want to have access to the feature, see Invoice Settlement Enablement and Checklist Guide for more information. After Invoice Settlement is enabled, the Invoice Item Adjustment feature will be deprecated for your tenant.

  • credit memos
  • debit memos

Credit balance payments and credit balance refunds can use their own separate codes or use the same codes as payments and refunds.

Using Accounting Codes in Zuora

Zuora's chart of accounts contains the accounting codes used to categorize your Zuora transactions for accounting purposes. In accounting terms, these codes identify the account affected by a transaction, such as Accounts Receivable or Cash. In fact, many of our customers simply use their GL account names for Zuora accounting codes.

Using accounting codes to group transactions within reports makes it easy to generate reports on the various categories of financial activity. One typical purpose of such reports is to produce totals to use for summary journal entries in an accounting system.

Not everyone uses accounting codes in exactly the same way. For instance, some use the same accounting code for payments and refunds, so that when you aggregate both, you get a single net payment amount. Others prefer to use separate accounting codes so that they can keep separate totals for payments and refunds.

Once the accounting codes are in use, there are strict limitations on the changes you can make. We strongly recommend that the company CFO or Controller participate in the planning of your Zuora Finance configuration.