# Accounting export

The **Comptabilité** (Accounting) group is what leaves the software for your accountant: the **journal** for a period, in balanced entries, under the numbers of **your** chart of accounts. The sales, the purchases and the bank movements of the period are taken from your own documents.

Setting it up happens once, in two gestures, and the export is then one click at each month end.

## Loading your chart of accounts

Open **Comptabilité, Plan et cartographie** (Accounting, Chart and mapping), a screen open at the Owner rank. The chart is **your accountant's**, loaded as it stands: a **CSV** file with two columns, the account number then its label, the header being optional.

Every country has its own chart and every practice its own habits, so the numbers come from you and from nowhere else. Loading the same file again updates the labels and adds the new accounts; nothing is taken away, an account missing from the new file staying in place because it may carry entries already exported.

## Mapping your accounts

The **mapping** says which account of your chart plays which role. It is the piece that ties what the software knows ("this is a sale") to the way your accountant writes it.

Six roles are expected before you can export:

| Role                                           | What it carries                     |
| ---------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------- |
| **Clients** (Customers)                        | what your customers owe you         |
| **Fournisseurs** (Suppliers)                   | what you owe your suppliers         |
| **Ventes** (Sales)                             | the revenue of your issued invoices |
| **Achats et charges** (Purchases and expenses) | the cost of your received invoices  |
| **TVA collectée** (Output VAT)                 | the tax on your sales               |
| **TVA déductible** (Input VAT)                 | the tax on your purchases           |

Four more are set according to your habits: **Caisse** (Cash), **Banque (par défaut)** (Bank, default), **Gains de change** (Exchange gains) and **Pertes de change** (Exchange losses).

In **Associer un rôle à un compte** (Map a role to an account), pick the role, the account, and a **rate** if you want one. The rate is optional: left empty, the line covers the whole role; filled in, it holds for that rate alone, and the export falls back on the line without a rate for the others. It is entered in basis points, `2000` meaning 20%. That is how a practice keeping one sales account per rate gets exactly its breakdown.

The screen tells you at any moment what is still missing, before the export rather than three thousand documents later.

### The number of your bank accounts

The lower part of the same screen lists your **bank accounts**, each with its own number in the chart. The link is decided here, with your accountant, rather than on the bank screen.

This is where reconciliation pays off: a payment reconciled with a movement on that account is written **under that account**, and the others fall on the **Banque (par défaut)** role. See [Bank and reconciliation](/en/erp/banque.md).

## Exporting the journal

Open **Comptabilité, Export comptable** (Accounting, Accounting export), set **Du** (From) and **Au** (To), then **Exporter le journal** (Export the journal). The period is offered on the **current financial year**, the one opening in the month your company has chosen, which holds just as well for those closing somewhere other than December.

You get a CSV file, one line per entry line, in time order, with these columns:

`journal`, `journal_libelle`, `date`, `piece`, `compte`, `compte_libelle`, `tiers`, `libelle`, `debit`, `credit`, `devise_de_tenue`, `devise_origine`, `montant_origine`.

Three journals are in it: **sales** (`VE`), **purchases** (`AC`) and **bank** (`BQ`).

## What holds the quality of the file

* **Entries are balanced**: debit equals credit on each one. The export checks it and tells you, rather than handing over a file your accountant's software would reject;
* **amounts are in the company's bookkeeping currency**, with the original currency and the original amount in columns alongside when the document was issued in another currency;
* **conversion is done by allocation** across the tax bands, and not rate by rate, so the sum of the lines falls exactly back on the total frozen at issue;
* **entries are derived from your documents** at each export: they always say what your invoices say, with no second book to keep in step with the first;
* **the document reference, the account label and the party name** travel with every line, enough to trace an entry back to its origin without coming back to ask you.

This file is the journal your accountant takes up to keep your books and produce your statements, under their own responsibility.