Should departments live in the chart of accounts or in a dimension?

One chart, 211 accounts, two requests.

The current answers agree that dimensions beat extra accounts. ClonePartner shows the multiplication: 10 expense accounts by 5 departments by 4 locations is 200 accounts. None of them shows how to decide a single split, or how to move the history once you have decided. So here is one chart, worked through.

The example is a US software company on QuickBooks Online Plus, with five departments (Engineering, Sales and Marketing, Customer Success, Product, G&A), three offices (Austin, Boston, Remote) and three product lines. Classes were switched on late, so most splits live in the account names.

Then, in the same quarter, two requests arrive. Sales and Marketing become separate departments, and the board wants payroll and people costs by office. In this design that means 11 natural accounts by 6 departments by 3 offices, 198 accounts where there are 55 today. The chart goes from 211 to 354.

That is past a hard limit. Intuit’s usage limits page caps the chart at 250 active accounts on Plus and allows 40 classes and locations combined. Advanced lifts both. A bigger plan fixes the limit, not the design: every new department or office still multiplies the chart.

Five questions decide account or tag.

An account says what kind of money it is. A tag says who, where, or for what. Most splits are easy to place once you ask these in order and stop at the first yes.

The tax question is the one teams forget. Under IRS Publication 463, most business meals are 50 percent deductible and entertainment is treated separately as nondeductible, so a single “meals and entertainment” account makes the tax preparer split it by hand every year. Meals by department is a tag. Meals against entertainment is two accounts.

The entity question matters for anyone adding a second company. A class can label income statement lines inside one set of books. A subsidiary needs its own balance sheet, its own tax filings, and intercompany balances that are eliminated in consolidation.

The rebuilt chart has 143 accounts.

Run the 91 split accounts through the test and every one of them fails the first four questions. Payroll collapses to 5 accounts, people costs to 6, office costs to 5, cost of revenue to 4 and revenue to 3. The 62 other income statement accounts and 58 balance sheet accounts stay as they are, including six bank accounts, each reconciled to its own statement.

Three dimensions carry the rest: department with six values, location with three, and product line with three. The two requests now cost one new department value and no new accounts. A fourth office would be one more location value.

One thing to check before you design around tags is where your current system lets them sit. In QuickBooks, Intuit’s class tracking settings let a class go on each row of a transaction, but a location can only be set once per transaction. A software bill shared by the Austin and Boston offices cannot be split by location there, which is one reason the old chart split rent and utilities in the account names.

Map the history, then prove it ties.

Changing the design is the easy half. The history still sits in the old accounts, and the first comparative report in the new system has to agree with the old one. The work is a mapping: one row per old account, with its new account and tags. Here are eight rows from the example, with twelve months of balances in US dollars.

Five rows map one to one. The two Sales and Marketing rows do not, because the department they name no longer exists. Salaries split by employee, using the payroll register. Contractors split by vendor: the marketing agency to Marketing, the sales training firm to Sales. Write down the source of each split, because the auditor will ask where 401,000 came from.

The software row is the quiet one. Of its 141,800, 88,200 is company wide tools such as chat and email that every department uses. Mapping it to G&A keeps the history true to how it was booked. Whether to allocate those tools across departments from now on is a policy decision for the new year, not something to rewrite into the old one.

Every old balance lands in exactly one place, and the expense rows still total 2,592,600 before and after. Run this check on every mapped account before loading anything. A mapping that does not tie produces a comparative income statement that disagrees with the one the board already approved.

1. Export the active chart with twelve months of balances. Mark every account whose name carries a department, office, product or project. In the example that was 91 of 211.
2. Run each marked account through the five questions. What survives as an account becomes a natural account; the rest of the name becomes a tag.
3. Write the mapping one row per old account: the new account, each tag value, and how the balance splits when it does not map one to one. Name the source of every split, such as the payroll register or the vendor.
4. Prove the mapping before you load anything. For every old account, the sum of its new account and tag combinations must equal its old balance, to the cent. The income statement total must not move.
5. Decide how far back to retag. The open year plus one comparative year is usually enough. Leave older years at account level and say so in the migration notes.
6. After go live, check untagged lines at every close. A cost with no department is the new version of an account nobody can map.

How Rivane holds accounts and tags today.

In Rivane each entity keeps its own chart. Every account carries one of 43 account types, and the type decides where it lands on the statements, including whether a balance sheet account is current or non current. Dimensions are a separate list from the chart, so a new office is a new location value, not a new account.

# How Rivane holds accounts and tags today.

chart        one per entity; 43 account types,
             each fixing the statement line and
             current or non current
numbers      required, unique within the entity
retire       deactivate keeps the history;
             delete is refused once an account
             has postings
dimensions   department and class across the
             group; location and project per
             entity; up to five levels deep
archive      a retired value keeps every past
             reference
journal      department, location and project
lines        on each line
segment P&L  by department, location or project,
             posted lines only; untagged lines
             shown as Unassigned
migration    QuickBooks accounts, classes and
             departments mapped by a person, in
             three steps

The migration screen takes QuickBooks accounts, classes and departments (the name QuickBooks uses for locations in its data) in three mapping steps, and a person picks the Rivane account or dimension for each. The segment P&L puts any posted line without the chosen tag under Unassigned, which makes it the check from step six.

Some limits worth knowing. Journal lines carry department, location and project but not class yet, so in the example product line would ride on project for now. Tags are set on journal lines through the API; the journal entry screen has no tag picker yet, and bill lines do not carry tags yet. There is no rule yet that makes a tag required on an account, so the Unassigned line is the control to watch. Budgets are held by account, with a separate department view of budget against spend.

Keep the chart for what the money is.

An account earns its place when it has its own reconciled balance, its own line in the statements, or its own tax treatment. A separate company gets its own books. Everything else is a tag. Do the redesign while you are moving systems, because that is when the history gets mapped anyway, and prove every mapped account ties before anything loads.

If you are planning that move, see how Rivane compares with QuickBooks.

Sources

• Intuit, Learn about usage limits (updated 5 August 2026). Read in the page for the chart of accounts limit of 250 accounts on Simple Start, Essentials and Plus, 40 combined classes and locations on Plus, and unlimited accounts, classes and locations on Advanced. Only active accounts, classes and locations count.
• Intuit, Turn on class tracking (updated 3 August 2026). Read in the page for the choice between one class for the entire transaction or one class for each row, and the note that class tracking for payroll applies only to new and future payroll transactions.
• Intuit, Customize sales forms by location. Read in the page for the note that each transaction can carry one location only.
• IRS, Publication 463 (2025), Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses. Read for the general rule that only 50 percent of business meal expenses is deductible, and its separate treatment of nondeductible entertainment.
• ClonePartner, QuickBooks to Sage Intacct migration and dimension mapping. Read as a current answer. It shows the multiplication, 10 expense accounts by 5 departments by 4 locations giving 200 accounts, and says a flat chart has to be restructured into dimensions during a migration.
• AAFCPAs, Is your chart of accounts an unnecessarily complex maze? Read as a current answer. It describes account strings growing a segment at a time and recommends moving to a multi dimensional structure.

A note on how this was researched. The three Intuit articles were read on Intuit’s own help pages, and Publication 463 on irs.gov. The two current answers were read in full as text. The company, its chart and every balance are examples, and the counts and tie outs were computed in a script and checked by hand. The Rivane section describes the product as built today, checked against the code rather than marketing copy.

On embedded social posts: we looked for public posts from practitioners or vendors on choosing between GL accounts and dimensions and found none we could verify as current, relevant and authentic, so this article uses ordinary citations instead.