Chart of accounts

The Chart of accounts is where your money gets filed. Every expense, every income, every balance and every debt is filed in an account, and that account decides on which line of which report the amount shows up. There's nothing else: there are no accounting categories and no report groups. The account is Clatri's only accounting taxonomy.

If you're coming from other finance apps, this is a fundamental change. In most of them, a "category" is a colored label used for filtering. Not here: the account is real accounting, the same one any accountant in the world uses, and it's the reason your reports balance on their own.

The three things called "category"

It's worth taking the word apart, because three different things show up in your financial life with the same name and only one of them is accounting.

	What it is	Does it decide where the amount lands?
Accounting account	The accounting truth. It's the line on the report.	Yes. It's the only one that does.
Bank category	The label your bank or your bank connection prints on the movement.	No. It's a hint the classifier can use.
Product category	The shelf in your sales catalog ("drinks", "consulting").	No. It's commercial, not accounting.

When a bank transaction arrives with the label "Travel", that label doesn't file anything. It's a signal, one among several, that helps decide which account it should land in. The one that files is the accounting account.

The five roots

Everything hangs from five root accounts. You don't choose them; they exist because that's how accounting works.

Root	What it holds	Where it reports
Assets	What you have: cash and banks, accounts receivable, prepaid balances, investments, property and equipment	Balance sheet
Liabilities	What you owe: accounts payable, credit cards, loans and debt	Balance sheet
Equity	What it's worth to you: contributed capital, retained earnings, opening balance	Balance sheet
Income	What comes in: sales, investment income, financing income	Income statement
Expenses	What goes out: cost of sales, operating expenses, finance expenses, taxes	Income statement

Under each root hangs a tree. Expenses → Operating expenses → Marketing → Advertising is a perfectly normal branch, and you build it however you need.

A report line is just a parent account

This is the idea that replaced report groups, and it's worth understanding because it simplifies everything: grouping isn't a separate feature, it's the hierarchy itself.

If you want your Income statement to have a line called Marketing that adds up advertising, content and tools, you don't create a "group": you create a Marketing account and hang the three subaccounts from it. The report line is the parent account. A budget on Marketing can count the whole branch; a report can expand it or collapse it.

That's why, when you create an account, the parent is required: it's what decides which section of the report it will show up in.

Built-in accounts and your accounts

Each account carries a badge:

• Built-in — part of the skeleton the standard reports need for grouping. It can't be renamed, moved or archived. These are the structure that makes the Balance sheet balance.
• Yours — you created it. Rename it, move it, archive it, hang subaccounts from it.
• Grouping only — nothing is filed directly in it; it adds up its subaccounts.
• Archived — it's no longer offered on new movements, but everything you filed there stays on your books and keeps reporting.

Your chart of accounts doesn't start empty, nor does it force you to set it up before you begin: "Your chart of accounts is created with your first movement."

What you see in an account

When you open an account you find four things.

What this account affects. In plain language, no jargon: "What you spend here lowers your result. It leaves your cash when you pay it." If the account only groups, it says so: "Nothing is filed here directly. It adds up its subaccounts."

Movements. Everything that landed in that account, with the option to drill down to the individual transaction. It's the same detail you reach when you tap a line on any report.

Rules. Which rules file movements here automatically. You can read them, but they aren't created here: a rule is born from a transaction, at the moment you correct its account and tell Clatri to use that correction in the future.

Subaccounts. The rest of the branch.

Creating an account

The fields matter, and two of them feed reports you might not expect:

• Name and description.
• Sits under — the parent. It decides the report section. The screen shows you live where it will end up: "It becomes an expense, like the account above."
• Movements can be filed here — turn it off if the account exists only to group others.
• Cost behaviour — Fixed, Variable, Mixed or Not applicable. "A fixed cost holds steady; a variable one tracks how much you sell." This is what feeds the break-even point in your Income statement. It's your judgment, not an assumption made by the system: nobody can know from the outside whether your rent is fixed or variable in your business.
• Cash flow activity — Operating, Investing, Financing or No cash movement. This decides which section of the Cash flow statement it appears in.

Changing the icon

Each account comes with an icon that Clatri picks on its own, based on what it is. If you'd rather have another one, open the account and tap Icon: you pick one from the catalog, grouped by theme (food, transport, home, health, leisure, money…). On the web it's in each account's ⋯ menu, as Change icon.

The icon is purely visual: it doesn't move any amount or change any report. That's why you can also change it on built-in accounts, even though you can't rename them. If you change your mind, Default icon restores the one Clatri had picked.

It also works by chat: "give Game purchases a video game controller icon". Clatri suggests options from the same catalog; emojis aren't used as an account icon.

The same catalog, with more than 400 icons and search in your language, is used for your businesses, assets, savings pockets, projects, habits, spaces, pages, boards and contact labels. In projects, habits, spaces, pages, boards and labels you can also use an emoji (for example a flag, which doesn't exist as an icon). When you create something by chat, Clatri picks an icon that fits.

Archiving without breaking the past

Archiving an account doesn't reclassify your history. "It stops being offered on new movements. Everything already filed here stays on your books and keeps reporting."

If the account has movements, Clatri doesn't let you archive it blindly: first it asks you to move them. "This account already has movements. Choose the account they should move to; none of them are deleted." You pick a destination account of the same nature and Clatri moves them, leaving a trail.

When Clatri doesn't know

When a transaction arrives —from chat, from a statement or from your bank— a classifier applies your rules in this order: prepaid balance or source account, recurring payment, contact, bank category (as a hint), description pattern.

If no rule applies, the transaction stays Unclassified. It's not an error or a broken state: it's the honest answer. Clatri never invents an account to make a report look complete, because a made-up number is worse than a missing one. Unclassified transactions wait for you to decide, and as soon as you do, you can ask it to remember the decision for good.

Control accounts: money in transit

In the tree you'll find accounts with odd names: Unresolved internal transfers, Unresolved card payments, Unresolved investment contributions.

They're temporary, on purpose. When your bank reports money going out that isn't an expense —a transfer to your own account, your card payment, a contribution to an investment—, that money can't disappear or be counted as an expense while Clatri doesn't know where it went. It stays parked in a control account until you connect it to its real destination, in To assign.

Those accounts having a balance isn't a failure: it's Clatri telling you, precisely, what it still needs to know.

Where it lives

On the Money dashboard, the stats section is called Where your money went and its See all opens the Chart of accounts. From there you also reach Budgets, which are defined per account.

And like everything in Clatri, it works by chat: "create an expense account for software subscriptions under Technology", "how much have I spent on Marketing this quarter?", "archive the print advertising account".