3 min readOct 5, 2021
QuickBooks POS: Chart of Accounts by Department — Sub-accounts in QuickBooks Desktop by Department
Today you will learn about chart of accounts by department and creating sub-accounts by department. Let’s begin:
- Go to “File” and “Preferences, then click “Company”.
- On your Company Preferences click “Accounts”.
- On the Basic tab, you’ll see the Item type, Income account, Cost of Goods sold, and the Asset account.
- You might want to check “Automatically create sub-accounts based on”.
- You can make sub-accounts according to “Department” if you’re just a single location this would be good, “Store, then department” if you’re a multi store location and you want to split it out by store and then by department, “Department, then store” if you want to know how the same Department is doing across multiple stores.
- You can use sub-accounts for “Income accounts only” or “Income, COGS, and Assets”.
- Then click “Apply accounts to existing items”.
- Select “Yes”.
If you want to see the immediate changes
- Go to “Financial”, select “Update QuickBooks”.
- After you update select “Close”.
- A message will be sent by QuickBooks accounting, select “Yes”.
- On your accounting chart click the arrow besides Merchandise Sales.
- Now you will see Merchandise Sales that are split out into departments.
- You can see here on different days you sold stuff from different departments.
- You can do comparison on different departments on what’s doing well and what is not.
Another way to edit your sub-accounts.
- Go to “Item List”
- Select any of the items, then click “Edit” on the right side of the field.
- On your QuickBooks Option section, you can see Cost of Goods Sold Account, Income Account, and Asset Account. Drag down any of these accounts you will use then you can now edit sub-accounts on any of the three main accounts.
