You Can Know What You Don’t Know: Chart of Accounts

Continuing my series offering best practices and tips to address the many challenges executives at health centers face, this month I am addressing the topic of the chart of accounts and accounting for grants. 

This topic seems basic and a bit granular, but when you understand the premise, “What gets measured, gets managed”, these are important topics.  I set out to do a series of topics on themes that I routinely see. I continually encounter scenarios where analysis is limited due to poor use of data often due to poorly designed chart of accounts structure.  If data isn’t accumulated in a way to help measure your organization’s finances, then it will be challenging to use the data to make good decisions. I think many executives try to understand their organization’s financial reporting and conclude it’s all gibberish simply due to a poorly designed chart of accounts.   

I summarize the chart of accounts data shortfalls as follows:

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